Artist’s Choice

Artist’s Choice: Andrew Luk
Phase IV Screening & Artist’s Talk

Artist’s Choice: Andrew Luk
Phase IV Screening & Artist’s Talk

Artist’s Choice: Tsang Kin-Wah
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Artist’s Choice: Yan Wai Yin
Terror Nullius + Breathless Animals Screening & Artist’s Talk

Artist’s Choice: Ocean Leung
Bullets Over Summer screening and artist’s talk

Artist’s Choice: Ann Hui
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Artist’s Choice: Wong Wai Yin Coffee and Cigarettes Film Screening and Artist’s Talk

Artist’s Choice: Leung Lee Chi Taxi Driver Film Screening and Artist’s Talk

Artist's Choice: Hon Lai Chu A Reading of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Artist's Talk

Artist’s Choice: Ho Sin Tung March Comes in Like a Lion Film Screening and Artist’s Talk

Artist’s Choice: Law Yuk Mui Screening of Excerpts from The Assassin and Artist’s Talk

Date & Time

9 Nov 2022 7:30-9:30pm

Location

JC Cube

Price

Exclusive to Tai Kwun Fan, Free of charge

General

The upcoming edition of Tai Kwun Contemporary’s Artist’s Choice by Hong Kong–based artist Andrew Luk features Saul Bass’s 1974 cult classic Phase IV. This atmospheric science-fiction horror film tells the story of desert ants forming a collective intelligence and making radical designs on humanity.

Visually stunning, with an impressive cinematography of humans as well as ant sequences, Phase IV delivers a quasi-mythic, dystopian vision—at times with humour, both intentional and unintentional. Its overturning of a human-centred order engenders a macabre existential dread, which decades later finds echoes in the planetary climate emergency we find ourselves.

Phase IV has also inspired Andrew Luk, a Hong Kong–based artist who has worked with, among others, a range of industrial materials—most memorably in the Horizon Scan series, where his napalm-based paintings force viewers to reckon with the traces and records of violence and destruction. With his fascination in the complex entanglements of humanity and nature, and his ongoing research on how violence is represented and “progress” schematised, Andrew Luk’s choice of Phase IV is perhaps unsurprising. The film’s somewhat absurd, even laughable premise delivers a moody sensibility on point, ultimately with a degree of wry, cosmic humour.

Andrew Luk will be present before the screening. By listening to what the artist finds inspiring in the film and how it has influenced his artistic practice, viewers will also get to find out a good deal more about Luk’s artistic practice.

Phase IV

Director: Saul Bass

America|1974|93 min|Colour|In English with Chinese and English subtitles|IIA

Like many early 70s sci-fi films, Phase IV conjures a gloomy and brooding vision: the story of desert ants suddenly coming into collective intelligence and waging war on the inhabitants. As a science-fiction/horror film that is also a siege story, Phase IV is remarkable additionally for how the ants are themselves portrayed as characters rather than a homogenous threatening mass. Set to a 70s synth-based soundtrack, the film haunts with striking imagery and foreboding gravitas.

Directed by Saul Bass—who is perhaps better known for creating credit sequences in certain Alfred Hitchcock films, and apparently even designing and conceptualising the shower scene in PsychoPhase IV won the Special Jury Prize at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival in 1975. Yet for the most part Phase IV had been a lost gem from the 1970s and has only in the decades afterwards gained cult status, not least in the eyes of the novelist Stephen King, who praised it in his text “Danse Macabre”.

The Tai Kwun Contemporary programme Artist’s Choice invites artists to share their own works or favourite works by another artist—be it film, music, literature, among others—followed by an artist’s talk or presentation. By encouraging artists to share their interests and ideas with audiences through the prism of individual choices and in-depth conversations, Artist’s Choice aims at providing a unique yet intimate perspective in understanding artists and their practices.

* This is an open seating event. The artist’s talk is conducted in English, with English-to-Cantonese simultaneous interpretation. 

The event will adhere to the latest health and safety regulations and enforce social distancing measures.


Artist Bio

ANDREW LUK

Born in 1988 in the US, Andrew Luk was raised in Hong Kong, where he is now living and working. He graduated from the New England School of Art and Design (NESAD) in Boston, Massachusetts, with a BFA in 2010. In the same year, he also graduated from Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts with a BA in European History. Luk’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Next Act, Asia Society, Hong Kong (2020); Very Natural Actions, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019); Serious Games, HOW Art Museum, Shanghai (2019); Appropriate Responses for Featherless Bipeds with Broad Flat Nails, chi K11 art museum, Shanghai (2018); A Tree Fell in the Forest, and No One’s There, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2018); Practice, de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong (2017). His work is included in public collections worldwide, including Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, US; Frank. F. Yang Art and Education Foundation, Shenyang; University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, Chicago, US; and K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Facebook, Hong Kong; among others.