Holding Patterns: Kien Situ

SYDNEY
4A HAYMARKET
9 JULY – 2 AUG 2020
In a period of uncertainty and stasis, artists have demonstrated the capacity of human creativity through artistic innovation, lateral thought, and inspired action. In our current period of changes and shifts, 4A is pleased to invite you to engage with Holding Patterns, a series of four solo exhibitions on view from July to October. Curated by Con Gerakaris and Reina Takeuchi, these exhibitions highlight and support the works of Sydney-based artists Kien Situ, Crossing Threads®, Shireen Taweel and Sofiyah Ruqayah, utilising our ground-floor gallery space and windows out onto Haymarket’s streets.
View the Holding Patterns: Kien Situ roomsheet here.
View the Holding Patterns: Kien Situ wall labels here.
Listen to Kien Situ in conversation with John Choi (Founding Partner, CHROFI) here:
Kien Situ (b. 1990, Sydney) is a sculpture and installation artist meditating on memory, cultural amnesia and identity in relation to the aesthetics of constructed objects and environments. Drawing upon familiar spatial, formal, textural, tectonic and material experience of his East Asian upbringing, Kien utilises and dissects his Eurocentric architectural education to create objects which reinterpret formative aesthetic and sensory experiences obfuscated by a diasporic childhood. His works are a physical melding of this experience, casting industrial gypsum cement with the regional, “artistic” material of Chinese Mò ink, a material central to the artist’s practice as part of the investigation into the symbiotic relationship between geography, place and identity.
Exhibition Documentation:
All images: Kai Wasikowski
Kien Situ, Shanshui (Wall Plate), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 48 x 48 x 8cm. Courtesy the artist.
Kien Situ, Shanshui (Wall Plate), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 48 x 48 x 8cm. Courtesy the artist.
Kien Situ, Shanshui (Stele), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 128 x 64 x 32cm. Courtesy the artist.
Holding Patterns Part One: Kien Situ (installation view) Left: Kien Situ, Shanshui (Wall Plate), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 48 x 48 x 8cm. Centre: Kien Situ, Shanshui (Scroll), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 88 x 64 x 8cm. Right: Kien Situ, Shanshui (Column), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 136 x 24 x 24cm. Courtesy the artist.
Holding Patterns Part One: Kien Situ (installation view) Front, Kien Situ, Shanshui (Column), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 136 x 24 x 24cm. Back left: Kien Situ, Shanshui (Scroll), 2020, Chinese Mò ink, gypsum plaster, 88 x 64 x 8cm. Courtesy the artist.
Holding Patterns Part One: Kien Situ (installation view). Courtesy the artist.
Return to Holding Patterns exhibition page