I am on a Zoom call with Lee Kit at 3 PM, Taipei time. He is smoking a cigarette and is much more candid than I have come to expect from those well-versed in the world of contemporary art and its veiled standard dialect. The artist, born in Hong Kong and based in Taiwan, does not adopt polite vagaries, though he is never rude. He starts off our interview with what I would come to understand as his characteristic directness. He states: “First things first. I always say that I’m quite unprofessional. I can easily be misunderstood as a conceptual artist or media artist, which is not true. I don’t care about ideas or concepts. If I can put the project into words, then I don’t have a reason to make the exhibition. There are some fragments; I call them keywords.”
The keyword his recent show at TKG+ in Taiwan was based around was ‘grievance’. Kit’s exhibitions are as layered as the artist himself is direct. The gallery’s rooms display paintings on stainless steel and drawings on paper, which serve a dual function as a surface for Kit’s signature projections. Abstract videos played by hidden projectors light the exhibition, altering the surface of the artworks with their movement, adding staccato lines of text. Plastic sheets ripple in the windowless rooms, playing with the pixels and adding to the soundtrack—Kit on his guitar—that fills the space.
The paintings are stripped-back landscapes, their metallic surfaces giving them an oil-slick finish, while the drawings show faces, rendered sparely, almost scrawled, in pencil. “I was mimicking or making fun of the landscape painters in some way, but in a beautiful way, I think. So many artists or painters are moving to making landscape paintings, which is fine,” he states. This first expression of his grievance connects the otherwise abstract paintings to the real world, his world, that they are a response to. He continues, “I find that it’s for money. It’s okay! I feel happy for you if you earn a lot of money, which I don’t.”
