LIE FHUNG: flight
FEBRUARY 16 - MARCH 12, 2005
CP ARTSPACE, JAKARTA

On 'Flight' - A Dialogue
By Timothy O'Leary & Lie Fhung

"The big error, the only error, would be to believe that a line of flight consists of fleeing life; a flight into the imaginary, or into art. But to flee [fly] on the contrary, is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon."

Gilles Deleuze

A series of artworks featuring porcelain wings, variously furled and unfurled, and using titles such as 'Flight' and 'Soaring', would seem to invite an obvious interpretation: an artist spreading her wings, finding herself, exploring her own powers. After a long absence from the art world, this is all no doubt true of the Chinese-Indonesian artist Lie Fhung.

The work talks about self. It is about personal struggles, about private wars between an individual and abstract societies, about asserting one's self and claiming one's identity amidst the mundane demands of living in a big city. 'Flight' is the embodiment - and the expression - of these processes that have reached a definite point: to be true to one's self, to 'come back' to what before was only known and accepted instinctively but now scrutinized, examined and understood. That is,to be an artist: to create art is the only truthful way to live for me. So with 'Flight', I took off on course towards becoming myself. This is the micro-view of the work, that is important and especially meaningful perhaps for myself only.

But these works are not just a celebration of a personal event. More fundamentally, they explore and express the sense of joy at re-discovering a forgotten power - the capacity to fly. In the piece "Invisible Cages", it becomes clear that the ties that bind - that bind the artist, the imagination, perhaps the soul - are themselves more imagined than real. Perhaps the only impediments to flight are in fact internal. But that would be too simple - the impediments are not purely internal, because we must also take into account the nature of matter itself. Flight is never a simple achievement. In "Invisible Cages", the cages are suspended from the ceiling, apparently already in mid-flight. But in "Soaring", each pair of wings rises up from a stoneware pedestal - each pedestal weathered and beaten, perhaps by years of waiting for this flight to begin. The wings themselves are made from white, translucent porcelain, delicately swaying on wire strands rising up from the pedestals. This combination of earth elements - stone and metal - to convey a sense of flight demonstrates not just the skill of the artist, but the essential feature of flight for terrestrial beings like us: flight is something which happens against the primary forces of matter, but it can happen only by using those forces. There is no flight - for us - without a base from which to fly, and an element in which to fly. No wings, no sky, without earth.

If flight is a metaphor, then the idea of the base from which we fly - the earth over which we soar - must also have more than one meaning. And indeed flight - the English word 'flight' - itself has multiple senses. To fly is not only to soar on wings, it is also to 'flee', to get away from something. But to flee, as the quote from Deleuze points out, is not to escape from life - the artist is not fleeing into a world of the imagination in which she will be protected from the harshness of 'life'. Art is not a refuge - there is too much matter in art, there is too much material. In fact to flee in this way is, precisely, to create, to create life.

But it is not a pure creation - there is no pure creation. It is a creating which occurs in a context and against a context - it has a base from which it emerges. This context can only be the culture in which the artist stands. In "Soaring", the stoneware pedestals stand on a black metal base. This base is finished in matt paint, it draws no attention to itself. In fact, in the darkened room, against a black backdrop, it almost disappears beyond the fringe of the gallery lights. It is like the cultural context from which the artist creates - against which she creates, and over which she wishes to soar. This context is not explored in these works. And in this fact, there is already a fleeing - the artist refuses the common demand that art should explicitily address its social and political context. She refuses the demand to create for someone, for some cause, for some view of society. And this flight is, as Deleuze points out, already a creation. And yet the context is always there, in the background, just beyond the reach of the spotlight - in the artist's own journey (from Indonesia to Hong Kong) in her relation to the art of ceramics, in her distance from the artworld. But, always in the background.

First of all, the work to be shown in the exhibition is not about the relationship between Hong Kong and me at all. Hong Kong serves more as a background, a foreign place where I work and live - its characteristic is not a significant factor in my work. Hence, I don't identify the work with Hong Kong at all. Hong Kong as a metropolitan city here serves as a venue of the creative process, a place where I am a totally unknown foreigner: invisible and detached. Hong Kong therefore could be substituted by almost any other big city outside Indonesia and the work resulted would have been more or less the same.

But how does the work relate to my context? The way I see it, a self is one of many. However solitary and personal one's life and struggle is, it is never completely exclusive and free from societal influence, demands and happenings. For example, I'm a Chinese-Indonesian who can't speak Chinese and who lives in Hong Kong which is a not a truly Chinese city either. There's a strong sense of 'rootlessness' in me, of always being a kind of an outsider, wherever I live - in Indonesia, Shanghai or Hong Kong. I am neither Chinese nor Indonesian. While this aspect does not obviously manifest in my works, it is there. It is part of the core elements that shape me as a self. It is an underlying quest(ion) in my journey to find myself and where I belong and to live my life as a free individual. So basically I am one of the many overseas-chinese, a part of the 'Chinese Diaspora' - and my works add to the diversity of this; some artists might show a strong ethnic/cultural values in their works, some might emphasise the alienation that this condition brings, and some might show a very subtle blends of this experience. I think my work is a sample of the latter. In 'Wandering Souls', for example, the hearts anchored to the stoneware bases are housed in boxes that subtly implies: a sense of mobility; and the idea of a kind of treasure box (of cherished childhood memories, for example) that people often carry with them when they leave their home to live in another place.While my works do not directly explore this issue, they nonetheless represent one of the diversities of the works of art in the 'Chinese Diaspora'.

But at a deeper level, these works speak of another kind of flight also - a flight from something in the human condition: our groundedness. In these works, our connection to the base, to the earth, is attenuated - we become light-footed, light-headed. In "Soaring 2", again, porcelain wings float above delicate curling wire that is fixed to the wall. Even the walls are beginning to fly, are becoming-flight. But this flight, as we saw, is not a simple matter. The artist, no less than we the viewers, must struggle to achieve lightness. If to flee (fly) is to "find a weapon", this is a weapon which targets not the base itself, but the forces which hold us to the base. The forces of gravity and inertia - both physical and social/cultural. These forces, in their social and personal form, are represented by cages and bottles - by enclosed, confining spaces which prevent the line of flight.

It is these forces which the artist's own force of creation battles against, and it is these forces which the works give us a weapon to counteract.

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