Is The Metro Station A Culturally Significant Place?

While most of us spend a big part of our daily routine on our city’s railway system, we barely recognize spaces like a metro station as a culturally significant place. These functional places and public infrastructures like the subway, foot bridges and airports have been concluded by anthropologist Marc Auge as non-places—places that are designed purely for the sake of functionality, thus with no cultural content.

Hong Kong based artist Joao Vasco Paiva extracts the aesthetics of the Hong Kong Metro central station in his latest solo exhibition Palimpseptic for the highly-anticipated first show of new Hong Kong gallery Saamlung .

The exhibition is centered on a kinetic sculpture which consists of five turnstiles—these minimalist, bulky, stainless steel machines encrypted with the flow of invisible people entering and leaving the subway station. Three hours of data was collected in Hong Kong’s Central station, which is then automatically reproduced by the machines. The artist aesthetically transforms the gates and empowers them to demonstrate a facet of urban movement in a gallery setting. The turnstiles are programed to rotate according to the rhythm and frequency of the crowd flow, creating a frenetic and rhythmic sound, the visual and sonic properties of the turnstiles were reduced to simple mechanic movements and a design that revels in its metallic and industrial silhouette.

A series of two-dimensional objects were also mounted in the fluorescence of the white gallery space. These objects are the result of Paiva’s research, based on the artist’s deconstructive exploration of the attributes of metro stations. By extracting visual components like colors, structures and forms from standard subway visual components like advertisements, station maps, and directional signage, he creates a world of abstracted imagery.

A video installation depicting the movement of the crowd exiting the metro is the only work that somehow shows the bodily traces, yet even this work still manages to convert the crowd into a monochromatic shape. Displaying the video in a short loop on a sculptural monitor on a steel slanted stand, Paiva continues the reduction and abstraction of the show’s other works despite the representational content.

The exhibition functions as a cohesive whole, an eloquently articulated artistic statement that expresses Paiva’s conceptual ideas through several different approaches emerging from a common point of departure: the metro station. All the pieces integrate into an individual world which is separated from the daily overflow of information. His abstraction experiments are practiced in different forms and grow both in a three-dimensional and two-dimensional space, building up a raw and primordial dialogue where signs are explored through thrilling aesthetics.

Read more about Palimpseptic on the interview of Joao Vasco Paiva with art critic and gallerist Robin Peckham.

Image Courtesy of Saamlung