Exhibition

Tung Wing Hong
​Domestic Matter

Duration_ January 11–March 1, 2025
Opening_ Saturday, January 11, 4–7 PM
​

Installation Views / Work / Press Release

Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present Domestic Matter, a solo project by Hong Kong artist Tung Wing Hong, on view from January 11 to March 11, 2025.

For the duration of the exhibition, Tung devises a kinetic sculpture Domestic Matter (2024), modified from a vacuum machine model to hover across the gallery floor. At once candid and coy, the presence of this seemingly “mundane” object enters as a voyageur in the dreamy arc of Danny Sobor’s private paintings. For the most part, the machine remains invisible and goes about its chores in a monotonous humming noise. But rather than erase the trace of human presence, as a “real” vacuum cleaner is expected to, Tung’s bewitched hoover does the opposite, roiling every dust like a spectacle into the air. In this deceptively simple gesture, the artist transforms the household appliance into a kinetic sculpture; the behemoth is turned into the enchanting.

Operating within this innate contradiction, Tung’s counter-performative cleaning machine distills a sense of irony or disconnection between its conventional functionality and its reinvented autonomous self. The work ties together the relationship between man and machine, and in particular, offers as a means to interrupt our preconceived understanding of objective reality, thereby questioning its validity. Here, the work’s fully functional yet impractical mechanism draws metaphorically to the inner tension and conflict which underlies our socio-political system of order and control.

In an added layer of absurdism, the automated sculpture constantly transverses and patrols the gallery space; unplugged and without a clear destination, it performs almost as a body of active disobedience. Nevertheless, its repeated collision with the enclosed walls indicates that there remains a barrier it can never overcome. Through the contrast between an enclosed, confined domesticity and the inaccessible, unreachable outside, Tung elucidates a familiar sense of indeterminacy, distressing inescapability of one’s repeated struggle in the future of sameness. In borderline situations, a glimpse of optimism to the underdog’s eternal endeavor against suppression. 

In the artist’s final attempt at wry humor, the work title Domestic Matter, while faithfully representing its content, also serves as a double entendre to the nuanced meaning of the phrase. The enigmatic machine looms as a brewing chaos, internal and external, anticipating a sensational disruption to the constructed tranquility on site.

Tung Wing Hong, born in 1989, now lives and works in Hong Kong. He studied in the Chinese University of Hong Kong and received his BA in Fine Arts in 2011, and MA in 2014. Tung’s mechanically intricate installations seamlessly combine elements of performance, moving-image and mechanical motions to propose a rethinking of viewer’s spectatorship and a nuanced perspective on the mechanical. Often drawing on sight, sound and looping motions propelled by electric motors to lure his audience in–whether to read into or react against these mechanical and technology-induced sensations–his video kinetic works give viewers the spaciousness of mind to experience whatever happens on screen and behind it, and to re-examine their physical and psychological relationship with the external environment. 

Recent exhibitions include: Domestic Matter, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2025; Perceptual and Intellectual - Explorations into Everything and Oneself, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 2024; ProjectPlayaround Showcase: FIRSTAGE, East Kowloon Cultural Centre, Hong Kong, 2024; A Small Land of Watery Light, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2024; Gentle Again, The Shophouse, Hong Kong, 2024; Make & Believe, F Hall Studio, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, 2024; Halfway Up The Flag, L0 Gallery, Jockey Club Creative Arts Center (JCCAC), Hong Kong, 2023; Hong Kong-Macau Visual Art Biennale - Perceptual & Intellectual, Beijing Quanye Chang (Art Center), Beijing & Museum of Contemporary Art & Planning Exhibition, Shenzhen, 2022.

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