Mind the gaps and watch your steps at joint show of visual art

A decade ago, this city had only one government-funded fine-arts undergraduate course, offered by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and it produced fewer than 30 graduates a year. Since then, that number has jumped 10-fold, thanks to a substantial increase of public money in similar or cultural-management courses. Coinciding with the art world’s interest in new media art and the influential view of some curators that “video is the new black”, City University’s School of Creative Media has benefited from expanded funding for its undergraduate, postgraduate and research initiatives.

Those extra funds are paying off, with graduates now exhibiting as mature video and new media artists. Alan Kwan Tsz-wai and Kenny Wong Chi-chuen graduated from the School of Creative Media and have also pursued overseas postgraduate degrees.

For their “The Interstitial” exhibition, the Pearl Lam Galleries SoHo provides an excellent high-ceilinged, two-level venue with space and synergy for both artists.

Interstitial space is the area between objects (e.g. the space between individual grains of rice). In this intelligent exhibition, each artist’s work has a strong individual voice, but there is also another, influenced by the show’s overarching atmosphere: the interstitial space “between the physical and the virtual to narrate emotion and memory”. This is not a quick-look exhibition; careful viewing of each artist’s video work slowly reveals that emotion.

A swinging video monitor takes centre stage on the gallery’s ground floor and, as it approaches the bottom of its arc, a woman’s full face or parts of her face are revealed. As the monitor swings upwards the image slowly disappears.