Andrew Luk
Oxidization / Immolation 4
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Andrew Luk
b. 1988, New Jersey, USA
Andrew Luk is a Hong Kong artist who works across a range of media examining the intricacies of the human experience as well as the myths and histories associated with civilisation building. Investigating the creases between binaries such as culture and nature, human and non-human, and the personal and the collaborative, Luk’s sculptures and installations explore utopian desires of perfection and their dystopian repercussions. His diverse practice is united through an exploration of ideological superstructures and their systems of expression — delicately tracing connections across disciplines, speculating on potential futures and revealing expressions of beauty, preservation and entropy.
Luk’s solo exhibitions include “Appropriate Responses for Featherless Bipeds with Broad Flat Nails” at chi K11 Art Museum (2018, Shanghai, China). His works have also been shown in various recent group exhibitions such as “Next Act” at Asia Society (2019, Hong Kong); “Very Natural Actions” at Tai Kwun Contemporary (2019, Hong Kong); “Serious Games” at HOW Art Museum (2019, Shanghai, China) and “A Tree Fell in the Forest, and No One’s There” at the Power Station of Art (2018, Shanghai, China). Luk’s work is collected by the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, USA and K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong.
Luk currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
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Horizon Scan / 2017
In Horizon Scan No.6 (2017), Andrew Luk torches pieces of a painted canvas using homemade napalm, collaging the charred pieces into an encased lightbox with gradually changing colour temperature. The illuminated piece appears to resemble a rugged and barren terrain. Interested in the material history of civilization, the work reveals and compresses facets of manmade and naturally occurring histories into a single frame.
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The Fragility of Things Built from Rock / 2018-2021
In The Fragility of Things Built From Rocks, the artist fills a concrete box with expanding foam before proceeding to smash the container in shards with a sledgehammer, resulting in a reproductive blossoming of ejected foam leaking out in a defiant state of natural growth. Used for building and repair, both the materiality of concrete and foam negates their typical controlled construction properties, debunking mankind’s generational obsession with permanence and legacy. As the foam sets in shape, it continues to darken over time, taking on an odd liveliness that disturbs the binaries of the natural and the artificial. The perverse beauty of the blooming foam through concrete faultlines recalls Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of World, who beckons readers to consider the possibility of collaborative survival in the capitalist and ecological ruins created by humans.
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Deep Earth Event Horizon / 2021
Luk’s Deep Earth Event Horizon series consists of large reliefs that emulate sites of excavation, an archeologist’s chance encounter with the past in the present time. The artist combines natural plant species with contemporary digital artefacts and buries them under semi translucent layers of resin and silicon carbide. Appearing to have been excavated from the same sedimentary rock layer, the uncanny composition insinuates a post-human future that casts its gaze back at our contemporary state. Not only is Luk critical of the myth-making and story-telling inherent in building civilization and national consciousness, his work makes bare humanity’s efforts to continuously develop an endless array of technological tools and artificial materials to reinforce our existing power structures. Luk’s acceleration and compression of organic and geologic time hark back to the concerns of the pioneers of the Land Art movement, echoing an eschatological moment in the Cold War era when mutually assured destruction through nuclear power seemed all but likely.
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Oxidization / Immolation / 2016-2019
In keeping with humanity’s capacity for destruction, the artist’s treatment of Oxidization / Immolation similarly sees a ‘canvas’ surface undergo an entropic intervention as the artist immolates homemade napalm over a copper surface. Revealed only when the flame has been extinguished, the copper surface is ultimately corroded and scarred into a black tangy oxide. Deeply rooted in these charred textures are references to napalm’s catastrophic destruction during WWII and the Vietnam War. The canvas surface suddenly is reminiscent of an aerial landscape, the volatile explosive’s unforgiving touch renders everything into nothing more but a blurry abstraction of shapes, textures and trauma. Recalling Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s crater works, these land artists treat the earth as a canvas from a bird’s eye view, imposing interventions to the landscape before handing nature back to itself to act upon organically for the many subsequent years.
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Untitled Vent Composition
Andrew Luk fabricates entropic installations that draw inspiration from the mischief of found objects. Defying logic and at times gravity, his work forms a new material order to investigate our relation to the corporeal world.
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