Canadian Art International: Germaine Koh

by Marie Leduc

Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong

The hot, steamy, vibrant life of Hong Kong is both horizontal and vertical. On the ground, life moves among the imposing bases of a forest of skyscrapers. Here the noise and smog are close and thick. Crowds converge and disperse at street corners and huge buses grunt and spew their haze in a grid of streets. If you move up a level, you walk along breezeways and air-conditioned passages across the slick marble surfaces of interior hallways. And even further above, life is stacked vertically, divided into a multitude of small private spaces.

Almost hidden in the midst of this urban maze are small and discreet parcels of nature. Manicured oases of green suddenly open up like meadows in the middle of a forest. Contained by concrete, they are tended with care and appear, at least to a Canadian familiar with great expanses of nature, a precious reprieve from Hong Kong's massive density.

In the narrow lower gallery at Para/Site Art Space, Germaine Koh has (re)presented nature's precious confinement within downtown Hong Kong. Shallow, square trays of earth and growing grass fill the small space. Balanced precariously on old chair and table supports, the trays are arranged in an incline toward the far end of the room. Like a rare art object, this little bit of green cannot be walked upon or around, only looked at and appreciated.

In an even narrower space upstairs, plastic water bottles are stacked against the walls. Held in place only by the weight of the water inside, they hug the walls on either side of the room. There is something of the verticality of this city and the containment of life within, but the complexity and fullness that one feels in the midst of Hong Kong's concrete forests are not fully conveyed here. If these water bottles are so many lives, so many buildings, then at least 100 or 200 more bottles would better describe the rich density that is life in Hong Kong.

These two works by Koh, like so much in Hong Kong, are both confined and defined by the limiting space. Para/Site Art Space, located in two narrow floors of a storefront shop, is one of Hong Kong's few alternative spaces dedicated to site-specific installations. Koh's pieces press at the limits of their small bare rooms, reminding us that space in Hong Kong, even for art, is carefully negotiated from the ground up.

Winter 2004