Mei-Kuei Feu
Pissenlits / Du Balancier, 1998

Mei-Kuei Feu
Pissenlits / Du Balancier, 1998

Espace 522, Montreal

Alice Ming Wai Jim

This review first appeared in Rice Paper 5:1, Winter 1999, 13.

Walking into the dimly lit interior of Espace 522 in which Cui Yong Jin and Mei-Kuei Feu's duo exhibition takes place, I can't help but feel like an intruder or night prowler on the loose in the backyard of someone's suburban home. Almost at once, I find myself negotiating between stepping on or manoeuvring myself around the carpet of green astroturf in Cui's Louez-moi (Rent Me) which doesn't quite make it wall-to-wall in the gallery. On it rests typical plastic white lawn furniture, but the way the two lawn chairs lean against the table clearly signals that visitors are unwelcome. A small monitor on the table plays a loop showing an aerial view of cars zooming by on an expressway during rush hour. The scene suggests, in a threatening way, the imminent return of the more than likely irritable estate owner, whose privacy I've just invaded. Further dotting this artificial landscape is a fake topiary tree and several green watering jugs arranged neatly in a row, with their interiors cut out and tags that read "Louez-moi." In effect, this lawn and all its works, non-fragrant and for rent, had long left their natural origins behind. And yet my experience, which had me lying low for fear of detection stayed with me, at least for a while, as did my yearning for the smell of fresh cut grass in the middle of a cold Quebec winter.

Cui's installation touches upon the banal, everyday existence of today's consumer society as exemplified by the North American suburban setting. At the same time, it points to how the accelerating development of new technologies has made obsolete such props as watering jugs for real grass, which were once considered integral to the staging of this material reality. Indeed the juxtaposition of the speed of the cars in the video with pseudo-natural products seems to ask us if the quest of our culture industry for an ideal functionality has replaced simple pleasures like the appreciation of nature.

Behind the imitation greenery of Louez-moi is Mei-Kuei Feu's Du Balancier which, apart from the tiny monitor on Cui's table, provides the only source of light for the two art works. This photography-based installation consists of a negative image of Cui's work, seen from the perspective of a viewer entering the exhibition space projected onto the back wall of the gallery. The artist's only personal mark is the handwritten word "pissenlit" ("dandelion"), which appears repeatedly on the projected image, as if lines in a notebook. In contrast to Cui, Feu explores questions of existence and the ways in which we perceive reality through the immateriality of the image. In a sense, the installation itself can be seen as a product of this reflection on the essence of being. For instance, the artist asks: if the light is off, does the projected image, or the viewer even, still exist? What is interesting about Du Balancier is how it relies on Louez-moi to complete its dichotomies of copy/real, immaterial/material, negative/positive and so on. However, while providing a link between the two works, these opposing relationships also reinforce their autonomy and uniqueness.

In Feu's Du Balancier as in Cui's Louez-moi, the impossibility of fully expressing immateriality or artificiality without reference to bodily experience can be seen in how these very concepts need to be mediated through what the viewer perceives to be real or not.

Alice Ming Wai Jim is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at McGill University. She is currently researching media art in Hong Kong.