Exhibition · Kiang Malingue · Hong Kong
Beneath the marble it isolates No other fire fulminates Than the console glittering there. — Stéphane Mallarmé, “Tout Orgueil fume-t-il du soir” Kiang Malingue presents at its Hong Kong location Wayfarer of Fire, a group exhibition bringing together Brook Hsu, Kwan Sheung Chi, Lai Chih-Sheng, Phillip Lai, Ellen Pau, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Samson Young. With a focus on the transformative power of cinema, sound and labour, the artists turn to Promethean figures and revolutionary visions, tracing the ways in which individuals and communities act as keepers of the flame, collectors of cinders, and fire-watchers—tending the life-giving potential of fire, reflecting on its mobility, monumentality, and memory, setting amnesia ablaze. At the heart of the exhibition lies Ellen Pau’s single-channel video Blue (1989–90), a pivotal work that commemorates tragic historical events through a montage of war imagery. Set to American vocalist Meredith Monk’s hauntingly evocative soundtrack, Pau’s masterful edit on a Betamax machine shapes the tape into a deliberately oblique sequence—the Hong Kong urban texture Pau favours gives way to glimpses of incendiary gesture, a barrelling train, and a choreography layered with footage of an event that remains unspeakable, opening a space of solidarity by way of solitude. The scratchy, tactile grain of the Super-8 projection suggests that the irrepressible urge to act, to mobilise, and to dance has turned the video into a body—one that questions its own capacity to remember and to forget. Phillip Lai’s installation Untitled (Hypnos) (2023) turns, on the other hand, to the absence of fire, and to the absence of any vigilant, fire-watching figure. As the title suggests, the installation—a siren that sounds in total silence, a lighthouse that disorients—means to hypnotise, working as a relentless, clock-like fixture that ensures one does not wake. One may, however, also attempt to identify with it: the rotating beacon light set atop…