11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

NOTE 1 Alex Wong, ‘Space: Solidifying the void’, in Szelit Cheung: Space [exhibition catalogue], Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong, 2021, p.37. BORN 1988, HONGKONG LIVES+WORKS INMELBOURNE +HONGKONG Szelit Cheung’s deeply atmospheric oil paintings are painstaking studies of falling light. Intimate in scale and tightly framed, the canvases depict unadorned architectural interiors glancingly illuminated by beams of sunlight, as if in late afternoon or early sunrise. Using restricted palettes dominated by a single colour — blood reds, acid oranges or deep blues — Cheung works through intricate tonal gradations, near-theatrical contrasts, and surface treatments that vary from sanding to surgically incised lines to lend powerful impressions of space and volume to stark, rarefied interiors. Cheung’s spaces are typically imagined or emulated, with the artist constructing maquettes and studying the effects of torchlight to replicate on canvas. This allows him to explore the same putative space from multiple angles and gives the effect of luminescence in his paintings — a ‘live’ sensibility that would be more difficult to achieve working from photographs. The marshalling of simple planes is also responsible for the minimal aspect of his spaces. The modest — occasionally miniature — scale of the canvases amplifies Cheung’s precision in drafting and colour application, while bringing the edges of the work into play as a compositional device. This compactness corresponds to the premium placed on space in the context of hyper-urbanised Hong Kong, and invokes a dynamic of expansiveness and constraint that may be read literally and metaphorically. Prior to this focus on architecture and light, Cheung’s paintings consisted of fastidious close-ups of the faces on votive statues, and patient studies of the surface of water at rest. His practice is preoccupied with the Zen Buddhist concept of Śūnyatā — the void as the origin of all things. There is, accordingly, a contemplative aspect to his careful evocations of light-fall, as well as a studied sense of transition. In the Asia Pacific Triennial, Cheung’s paintings are housed in a structure — and ambience — that resembles a small chapel, shrine or grotto, and whose sides are adorned with rib-like vents, in which tiny paintings are installed in a play of scale and perspective. At one end is a skylight admitting controlled light from a single source, which matches the light depicted in a centrepiece painting mounted on the inside rear wall. The structure is, in fact, a full-sized version of the maquette from which the paintings were made, so, in this instance, the space is both imagined and real, even if this ‘realness’ is achieved after the fact. As an evolution of Cheung’s presentational framework, this installation represents a shift in process — from imaging spaces to realising them. Arguably, however, both modes express a state that the architectural writer Alex Wong describes as ‘semifictional’. Wong notes that, for Cheung, the void of Śūnyatā is not the emptiness of an unfurnished, unpopulated interior, but the distance between perception and cognition. Rather than emptiness, Szelit Cheung’s spaces are rich in evocative potential, and their compositions of colour and light capable of generating what Wong describes as an ‘amalgamation of reality and memory’ for artist and audience alike. 1 And, like all good stories, they leave room for interpretation. REUBENKEEHAN SZELITCHEUNG Block (detail) 2024 / Oil on canvas, oil on wood, architectural construction / 11 paintings; centre panel: 70 x 50cm (approx.); 10 panels: 6.1 x 5cm; 300 x 236.6 × 328cm (overall, installed) / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2024 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / Image courtesy: The artist ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 72 — 73