Lee Kit: Never

Texts from Hu Fang, Anthony Yung, Martin Germann, Misa Jeffereis, Olga Viso, Lee Kit, Philippe Van Cauteren

Never consists besides a couple of commissioned essays of a long photographic sequence through installation shots and further visual material out of his practice, which transform the book to a further exhibition space, considering the fact that his exhibitions itself are almost impossible to photograph.

Lee Kit´s exhibitions unfold spatially as in-situ installations consisting of, among other things, paintings, projections, daylight, text, carpet, furniture, curtains, walls and museum architecture. The artist describes his exhibitions as three-dimensional paintings in which the effect of light, perspective depth and composition are major parameters. His ‘situations’, how he often applies them, appeal basic emotions and explore the no man’s land between things and their representation, between what is private and what public, and between the personal and the collective.

Starting from the precarious political situation in his native city of Hong Kong, Lee Kit’s work critiques the pursuit of efficiency in our fast-paced capitalist society. His installations make use of everyday things to form the ultimate opposite of this society: by making us experience time at a slower pace and by incorporating mass-produced articles for the promise of intimacy they imply. At the same time, Lee kit’s practice reflects the life of the artist in the hybrid Asian-European culture and the conflicting patterns of Eastern and Western thinking that converge in it.

• Koenig Books, 2016
• Hardcover, 8.5 x 5.5 in.
• 277 pages, color images