Lee Kit’s “Techno” art at TKG+

“I won’t claim that I am a political artist, because I don’t believe in political art, but I believe in doing art politically. That’s a different thing. One is a category, another one is an attitude or practice.” Thus Lee Kit expresses his view on his artistic practice in a 2016 documentary by the Walker Art Center. He does not openly ‘sloganise’, but offers “patterns”, traces, images that suggest, encourage, confuse. Through his immersive environments he creates in the exhibition space, Lee Kit transforms his experience of contemporary life, and the emotions derived from it, into introspective, abstract dimensions that push us to search for our own senses and perceptions.

Lee Kit’s work plays with transparencies, overlapping images and words, light and shadow, sound and silence, to create a narrative in which the art interacts with the space, and the viewer becomes part of it. Immersive, poetic and emotive, his installations use projections to create compositions in sync with objects placed strategically within the space.

In the Walker Art Center documentary, Lee Kit explains about his method:

A show for me is like a work, I cannot repeat it. Coincidence is an important part of my so called practice. I would even say my practice is just a coincidence. And another thing is that even until now I still think I am a painter, because I can’t deny I am a painter. […] I am a painter. The way I use projection for example. I basically compose them in a way that I think, oh this is a good composition, then I put the projection there and I put something on the floor to match with the projection. These compositions are based on the emotions I want to convey or try to capture. so it’s a painting but it’s also an atmosphere.

All images: Lee Kit, “Techno”, 2019, TKG+, Taipei. Image courtesy the artist and TKG+.

All this plays a part in his latest exhibition, “Techno”, at Tapei-based TKG⁺, where the environment Lee Kit creates recalls a dark basement, with electronic music, neon lights penetrating the darkness, and the information overload and excessive pressures of contemporary life. The infinite loop of images and sound envelops the space, with the repetitive, almost hammering rhythm of electronic music amplifying one’s sensations and perceptions. Although the space is virtually empty, the flashing projections and the music recall the over-saturated, hectic metropolitan life, and the glaring screens of the ubiquitous digital world. The contradictions of contemporary living thus become apparent. Ambiguity permeates the atmosphere, and Lee Kit leaves it to us to interpret once again the realm of his artistic imagination. The only discernible utterances come in the form of poetry and lyrics, lines superimposed on images coming out of quasi-lucid dreams and glowing reflections.

In fact, lately I find you repulsive.
The damage was done by you alone, but the trouble you caused harms everyone.
You are a hypocrite in a sincere world.
In your heart, you are convinced that no one understands you.
But to tell the truth, it doesn’t matter much anyway.
You are still just as disgusting.
Slowly, you begin to think of hypocrisy as sincerity. Slowly, hypocrisy becomes sincerity.

When the neck grows weary and aches for a massage, he misses his head.

He feels as though the bright lights in the city where he grew up gradually transformed into a kind of sound.
It is like the sound of bowing your head.
When you look down, every place seems the same.

Techno.

C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia

“Techno” by Lee Kit runs from 11 May to 7 July 2019 at TKG⁺, Taipei, Taiwan.