Artist-curator Katherine Ka Yi Liu’s current research draws attention to the generational trauma her home city, Hong Kong, has been facing since 1841. Her research became witness to the political transformation of Hong Kong from a British colony to a post-colonial state and has focused in particular on the nexus of power relations between the West and China.

Ceramics is one of the key elements in her practice and at Cove Park she will develop a new body of work, ‘absolute truth’, with Yixing Clay. This will take the form of written text on tiles and references the outline of ancient global maps. The text represents a philosophical process to unearth deep truths and is a direct extension of the artist’s existing work, ‘absolutely clear’, to form a series. This series of work confronts the hidden oppressions in our existing systems that are rooted in colonial and binary thinking; it critiques the perpetuated heteronormativity and institutionalised authorities in our contemporary capitalistic society through exploring the problematics in our communication system. The absurdity of language and the hopelessness during communication often appears in daily dialogues: how can one be absolutely clear when the system itself is problematic? And ironically, what is the absolute truth in our universal sense of reality when language is not neutral?

Image: Katherine Ka Yi Liu, A Poetic Revolution’, 2018-2019, by reclaiming our language, our voice, our culture, our history, our labour, our lives, our loving, our dancing. Detail. Shantung silk and bamboo linen rack, 150 x 40 x 4cm (photography, Sekai Machache)