To be dispersed, not to disappear

The metaphor of excavation plots the line of enlightenment. Ours has been a constant search for the grammar of life: methods by which we can extract sense from non-sense, decipher meaning from chaos, find vocabulary for the wisps we once resorted to calling ‘ghosts’. In its making visible the invisible, the act of excavation seeks to rescue the intelligible from the darkness of ignorance by reconstituting, piecemeal, fossilised memory. So begins the philosophical conundrum in which Hong Kong born artist Yi To prefigures the materiality of fragmented body, and its reappearance in the virtual as sign.

To’s intervisuality is thus a holding-in-contradiction of both the spectacle of discovery and the withdrawal of nether worlds that cannot fully be known. Her paintings, with their shadowy forms rendered in thin washes, beget a fragility. They take on the propositional aspects of loss, an eclipse’s negative memory; as with the yet-to-be-discovered relic, what results is the invocation of a waiting. What of the total indifference of these subjects to the indefatigable curiosity of the present? What of the misapprehension of a cave painting that derails studies of early life for another thousand years?

What happens with the immense onslaught of time, its unerring passage? A document, artefact or vestige of life that endures erasure appeals to the unconscious vis a vis aesthetic sensibility before anything else. Like To’s work, that which issues from bygone eras hovers someplace between figuration and abstraction, and occasions a reading that relies, firstly, on intuition. From the presence of the golden spiral in the human ear, to the ability of an amoeboid organism to solve a maze, the wonderment in intuition is perhaps at once the intimation of intelligent design.

Text by Elaine ML Tam