Painter Jeremy Ip on imagination through emptiness, the challenge of owning a gallery space, and cultivating different perspectives.
Ep.66 | I travelled to Kowloon Bay in Hong Kong where I met painter Jeremy Ip in his studio and gallery space. We talked about how emptiness evokes imagination, the challenge of owning a gallery space, why it is important to have different viewpoints and how he cultivates different perspectives through the activities at his art gallery.
Jeremy Ip is a painter based in Hong Kong, a busy city shaped with rational rules. Through painting, a temporary suicide, he strives for humility and stillness. Creating an ambiguous purity and immersive flatness using thinly layered oils reflects Japanese notions of Wabi-Sabi. In accepting and appreciating nature, these immersive surfaces are often inhabited by a fluid nucleus, calling attention to the subtle beauty of imperfection as an essence of simply ‘being’ and a possible alternative to our frenetic existence. The intensive labour of flattening and the smoothing colour is somehow meditative with the painter’s personal traces. Repeated slowly and deliberately, it renders the outcome a kind of container for the soul. The release of paint on canvas becomes a metaphor for decay as energy is broken down and quieted, then stored as a latent potential for regeneration. Chance is embraced in marks interwoven by fate rather than conscious decision-making.
I haven’t update the playlist for long, 100cmx100cm, Jeremy Ip, 2022
The painter becomes a tool and the artwork as a bi-product of inevitability in simply ‘being’, an individual passive existence such as a fruit, a mountain or a landscape. Viewers are invited to enter the absent emptiness as a space of grounding self-awareness. Perhaps associating this sense of calmness and absence with a reduction of the intelligent self to a creature in contemplation. A temporary escape from imposed rationality and order, it may feel like the hollowness or exhaustion that remains after an impactful experience has passed. In fact, the only subject of the painting is balancing the struggles and compromises of being both a culturally ‘civilized’ human and a weak, inadequate animal. In this context, the painting marks a phase of the painter’s life born within the flow of destiny. Both silent and passive, they foreground an attitude of acceptance that evades any specific communication beyond sharing the welcoming of fate.
Painting by Jeremy Ip
“Box of LeeLeeLooLoo!“ 《哩哩囉囉的盒子》at WURE AREA. Three Hong Kong artists, Cho Wing Ki, Wong Mei Yin, and Yeung Sin Man, who also habitually collect small items like stickers and pins, present their recent drawings, paintings and printmaking in this exhibition.
Exhibition Period: 30/6/2023 > 23/7/2023
Friday to Tuesday 1PM - 6PM (Close on Wed and Thur)
*Open on 1/7/2023
Instagram: @wurearea
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