Chris Kline & Yam Lau

[En anglais]

Installed in the two main galleries, Yam Lau’s two video-animations, Nüshu: Echo Chambers, are contained within freestanding translucent screened pavilions, while Chris Kline’s La Manche paintings occupy the surrounding walls. As one moves through the spaces, the artists’ works intermittently interrupt and frame the continuity of their respective narrative structures. The spectator’s movement is critical to understanding their relationship.

To see Kline’s paintings one must move across their surfaces. Hidden within these paintings is our contemporary search for identity, for a personal space of becoming. From this perspective, a dialectic is set up between the materiality of the paintings’ frames and the mirage-like apparition of thinly pigmented veils and rectangles contained within them. These barely suggested forms speak to the uncertainty of an infinite regress. In this mise-en-abyme, what version are they of themselves? As the artist notes, they are neither “screen, scaffold, surface, or support.” What is left, then? A frame — not of an image, a landscape, or an object — but the echo of our time from within a diversity of voices, across a multiplicity of social engagements and critical platforms.