Galleria dell’Arco Palermo, is pleased to announce the first italian solo show by Lee Kit (Hong Kong, 1978). One of the most interesting figures of the emerging chinese young scene, he has already taken part to several important international projects, featuring, among others, in Younger than Jesus, published by Phaidon in 2009.
The project presented in Palermo is part of the most recent research of the artist, “an exploration of everyday life using hand-painted clothes that function as traces, silent footprints of their own passage,” as the curator Helga Marsala writes.
Lee Kit uses neutral color pieces of fabric, customizes them with minimal, geometrical patterns, and finally transforms them into table-cloths, curtains, bed-sheets, and napkins, destined to a daily, regular use. A series of snapshots, deprived of any affected aestheticism, testifies of the newly acquired status of these pieces of fabric: the photographs are displayed along with the cloths themselves, the former documenting the latter and aiming at illustrating the intimate dimension of the artist ‘s life.
Lee Kit’s work takes form as action, documentation, and installation. The project presented in Palermo, focuses on the theme of journey. A suitcase, covered by painted fabric, is a metaphor but also a worn out trace of the trip that the artist has made from Hong Kong to Palermo. In the suitcase, all that was painted and used will be carried along for the Italian show. Whereas the suitcase refers to the concept of movement, the pieces of fabric carried in the suitcase are traces of the artist's life and experience. A series of works will be completed in Palermo, to embody the the present-day dimension.
As the curator says: “The use of found objects represents for Lee Kit a further reference to his own intimate dimension. The object becomes unpretentious and genuine: ordinary leftover, enclosed into its own status of a-functional objects, and converted into a linguistic remark upon the space.”
