Lands In-between
Ben Malcolmson & Kwok Tsui, exhibited at QSS, 2022
In Lands In-between, we see two artists engaged in deep play with the traditions of landscape image-making and the questions about space and representation that the genre of landscape asks. In Kwok Tsui’s canvasses, we find familiar elements of landscape painting — here the jagged line of a horizon, here a bird, here a curve that may well describe a sun setting or rising — but reduced to flat symbols and arranged in entirely fictive spaces, like scenery on a stage or a place only half-remembered. And our imaginative movement into these spaces he creates is always arrested by his complication of the painted surface with veils of thin white paint or lines that float above the image divorced from representation. Like Kwok, Ben Malcolmson invites us to pay attention to the surface of the image as we look through it to the space it denotes. In Malcolmson’s photographs, the irregular recesses and protrusions of the rocky places the photographs represent are both divested of their legibility and made literal by the crumpling of the paper they are printed on. In his video work, two projected images coexist or compete on the same surface and abolish the thousands of miles between the places they were filmed. These artists, in their reflexive engagement with the spatial mechanics of the traditions and mediums in which they work, offer new ways of thinking about our movement through the material world.
Text by Padraig Regan, 2022
