Installation view, Kah Bee Chow and Ingrid Furre (back wall)
Liquid Paper
by Louise Steiwer
It so happens that you may come to be reminded of your own advanced age in unexpected ways. You gaze at an everyday object, of the kind that’s been following you throughout your whole life – without your ever having placed a question mark beside it or, moreover, without ever having taken its essential character into consideration – primarily in order to acknowledge that it’s about to be phased out. Recently, the doors in my apartment underwent a change. In connection with the doors being shifted, an electronic locking system was installed: a small chip that you slide across a surface in order to open the door. I took a look at the old worn-out key in my hand. And, for the very first time, I contemplated it as an object because its time was running out.
Liquid Paper, an American brand of correction fluid, is one such phenomenon. Those of us who are a bit older can remember how one moved her/his way, with neat handwriting, down along the lined-off piece of paper, slowly and painstakingly. And then, just as one was nearing the bottom of the page, the pen might slip and leave a long and clumsy stroke in the midst of all this neatness. But this is something that could be fixed with a layer of correction fluid; and gingerly, we blew on the white lacquer in order to get it to dry faster, and then we continued. The good mark for orderly neatness was hereby rescued.
I don’t know with any certainty, but I can assume that the mark for orderly neatness is also one of the phenomena that has been phased out with the advent and subsequent rise to prominence of the computer. Having at one time been a disciplinary measure, which was supposed to promote assiduity and painstakingness, it has today become an arbitrary aesthetic decree, utterly detached from the content on which one would otherwise expect to be examined and graded. Like the correction fluid and the metal key in my apartment, handwriting is a phenomenon whose value is being too sharply downgraded. It has become liquid.
Liquid Paper is not so much a theme-based group show as it is a conversation about everything that’s flowing. About signs that are migrating from one sphere of meaning to another; about value that is slipping imperceptibly from the monetary and across the emotional to the aesthetic; and about materials that solidify, melt, flow and solidify again.
Hanging down from a pipe in the ceiling is a metal structure on a hook. At first glance, Kah Bee Chow’s work, Debts (III) (2023), looks like a bronze cast of a branch or of a leaf structure. The form has been inspired by an old-fashioned money tree, which was formerly used for casting coins. Its design is a function of how the liquid metal runs from the end of the tree out into the smaller branches and winds up in the round molds, where the metal eventually solidifies into coins. In Chow’s version, the money tree has become decidedly more organic, having been emancipated from its function as mold and from the monetary sphere in which the source model played a part. Instead, Chow links her tree up to a cultural tradition of money donations and gift practices in Southeast Asia, where she herself has roots, and to a spiritual world where sacrifices and offerings can give rise to prosperity. Nevertheless, it’s as if Chow’s money tree cannot fully let go of its connection to the mold. The metal, which ran through the branches in the original form, is now the very material in which the money tree has been cast. And although we have long since found other methods of manufacturing coins, Chow’s tree inscribes itself within a new cycle of value, by virtue of its status as aesthetic object.
In Martyn Reynolds’s work, Texture Study (2024), a series of somewhat turbid images has been printed on blue velour. The pictures appear to be moving their way along the edge of the shimmering fabric, and framing it in some kind of way, and they seem to be pursuing or reaching out for one another. These are pictures that Reynolds has found on the internet: a couple of Velasquez’s paintings; a few works from early impressionism; and a photograph of a banquet that was held in connection with Nixon’s visit to Beijing, among other images. They share some formal qualities: certain types of lines and motives recur from one image to another and emit an ambivalent sense of resonance and rhythm that prevails among their very diversified signs. The images function like small characters, maybe even like pixels of a kind that can migrate from one of the pictures to the next. The image’s power and value can be renegotiated, Reynolds seems to be saying: it can be broken down, can be rendered liquid, and can re-emerge in a new form. Here the picture is being resuscitated as a frame for the blue fabric, which changes in character according to how the light falls on it – and which may just bring memories of the screen’s blue light to mind.
Along the wall inside the exhibition space hangs Ingrid Furre’s piece, Koret [Choir] (2024). Here, that which is fluid appears to have solidified into a firm form; the metal is patinated and is now hanging down from the wall in a measured rhythm. These are lights with cold flames that will not melt the material, as candles most certainly would. And even so, they’ve been cast from molten metal, and their genesis is borne along with them into the exhibition. Here, the source model – the candle, which initially was liquid, then became solid and finally disappeared as it burnt down – is being amalgamated with the material – which initially was liquid and has now become solid bronze - and dresses the entire room in a gleam of ambivalence. For what value do we ascribe to that light which does not spread its rays?
In Liquid Paper, that which we thought was firm suddenly becomes flowing. That which we recognize and cling onto loses its function or becomes emptied of content and becomes transformed into another state of being. And suddenly we behold a new aspect of the familiar. Perhaps we are seeing it almost for the first time, now when we no longer have any need for it? As with keys, correction fluid and finicky penmanship, so is it also with metal, candles and pixels. They’re slipping right through our fingers and are, paradoxically, appearing before us all the more clearly and distinctly than they did before, as signs, as aesthetic and as value.
– Nov. 2024
Translated by Dan A. Marmorstein
