Exhibition Statement

In 1929, René Magritte completed a painting titled The Treachery of Images. He painted a pipe and added a line of text beneath it, resembling the composition of a children’s English vocabulary card. However, instead of writing Pipe, Magritte wrote Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). The painting interrupts the innate correspondence between text and image, prompting the viewer to reconsider their relationship. Perhaps the image does not represent the text; their mutual reference negates each other. In this case, what do image and text express – symbols, objects, matters, or concepts? This ambiguity transforms the relationship between image and text in art into something fluid and uncertain.

This small exhibition marks a second collaboration between Kitty Kong and Alex Heung following their previous exhibition Klara and the Orange Cat at the Gallery of Hong Kong Art School. In this exhibition, one artist exhibits sketches from previous exhibitions while another interprets the sketches with text. As image and text collide, original intentions become ambiguous, and new meanings and contexts are reconstructed. Will this be a re-description, a game, an experiment, or an exploratory process? Perhaps, this is not an exhibition at all.

This is not Klara and the Orange Cat— Exhibition at 5/F Youth Square, Hong Kong Art School
Exhibition Period: 14 Feb 2025 – 13 Mar 2025
Time:10am – 6pm (Closed on Sundays & Public Holidays)
Venue: 5/F, Youth Square, 238 Chai Wan Road, Chai Wan
Artists: Kitty Kong, Alex Heung