Life Force
Solo exhibition by Lie Fhung
About
Life Force, a solo exhibition of Lie Fhung, a multi-disciplined artist who currently lives and works in Hong Kong. Born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, Lie Fhung studied fine arts at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, majoring in Ceramics.
In her artworks, Lie Fhung investigates private matters: hidden layers within dreams, memories, human emotions and their drives. Art making is her way to contemplate and to bear witness to personal stories. She thrives in exploring and working with diverse materials from porcelain to paint, metal, and digital prints, which are often presented in the form of installations. For her, the act of creating is a matter of existence and survival.
This solo exhibition is the artist’s record of her experience of paradoxical interplay between life force and death wish; how they are part of the same cycle of life, endlessly moving between one another. Decay, destruction, death. Renewal, growth, life. How change is inevitable as a crucial agent for growth. How, when we are open and courageous enough to seek and to go through the depth, we will find that transformative power is inherent within death – in its many forms. There are life-giving seeds within death waiting to be nurtured to life anew. After all, life is stronger than death.
In her main installation “Life Force” – from which the title of this exhibition is taken from, porcelain is used for its contradictory quality: it is both strong and fragile. Porcelain is the most durable form of ceramics because it was fired at a very high temperature of 1300°C. On the other hand, it becomes extremely fragile when made into very thin shapes as Fhung has done here.
Fhung is also fascinated by copper, widely used in the rest of her artworks shown in this exhibition. In order to achieve certain nuances of colours and textures on the copper pieces, she has developed her own method to induce the oxidation – intervening the natural process, to somewhat direct the result to a limited degree. In this way, the artist collaborates with nature in creating her works. It’s a metaphor for life itself in which changes and transformations would eventually occurred. We can either be passive and let them shape us, or actively take part in shaping
“Life Force” is about taking risks; about the precarious balance that we call life. About both the fragility, and the tenacity, of life.
