Pearl Lam Galleries is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Amsterdam and Beijing-based artist Ni Haifeng, featuring works from the late 1980s to the present. The exhibition runs through September 2, 2015, invites viewers to draw parallel meanings between Ni's artworks of varying mediums and, in doing so, to contemplate their narrative as a whole.

Ni’s artwork refutes a linear or chronological interpretation by staging an experience that situates art, in the artist’s words, “in a zero moment or an instant of no gravity.” By removing the artwork’s temporal and physical content Ni asks the viewer to interrogate the politics of representation and exposes the inherent ideological structure that uses art to legitimate a set historical trajectory.

This exhibition is not intended to be a retrospective, instead, Ni’s selection of artworks aims to open up new possibilities for reading the artworks that are not bound by the binary oppositions of “I have heard” and “you will hear”. To destabilise our reading of the artworks, Ni reverses the gaze back at the beholders and asks us how we would give meaning to an experience that is autobiographical in nature. Who are we to judge the history of another individual, let alone its place in history?

While many embrace the new promises of cultural hybridity, Ni reveals the psychological impacts that colonisation and economic globalisation have on our subjectivities, how best to counter the demand for self-ethnicity as a potent form of cultural capital in an ever expansive cultural economy. These issues are not only the rubric governing this exhibition, but are also timely for a post-colony turned global city like Hong Kong to reassess its own identity as it aspires to become a cultural capital.

About the exhibition

Exhibition Dates: 31 July–2 September, 2015

Venue: Pearl Lam Galleries, 6/F, Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong

Courtesy of the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries, for further information please visit www.pearllam.com.