KITTY CHOU
Countervision
Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong is pleased to present Kitty Chou: Countervision, an exhibition of new photographs by Hong Kong based artist Kitty Chou. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with Ben Brown Fine Arts, and the second solo exhibition at the Hong Kong gallery, following her 2015 exhibition at the London gallery. This exhibition is comprised of two engaging bodies of work: Reflections and Colour & Space.
Chou’s abstract compositions are remarkable not only for their ethereal aesthetic quality but also for the way in which they are created. Chou is steadfastly committed to shooting with a simple digital camera and abstains from any form of staging in her creative process. The end result is a product of chance encounter, careful composition and captured moment. In an age when many images we encounter are extensively manipulated, Chou keeps her post production work minimal.
Equally notable is Chou’s unique way of seeing the world around her. She finds photographic opportunities in the commonplace and overlooked: the interplay of light, shadows, water, sidewalks, street signs, interiors and architectural structures serendipitously comes together behind her lens and results in strikingly profound compositions, entirely removed from their original context.
Reflections is an ongoing body of work first shown at the gallery in 2013 in an exhibition entitled It’s Just Water.… In this series, the artist captures the spontaneous interaction of varying objects with elements such as water and metal, resulting in wildly abstract, vibrant and seemingly kaleidoscopic imagery.
The counterpart to the Reflections series is Colour & Space, a new series of decidedly more austere, geometric and subtly coloured photographs in which the artist captures the interaction of light and shadow on mundane interior structures and objects. In Chou’s photographs, these three-dimensional structures are completely dissolved and flattened into abstract geometric forms, their subtle gradations of colour entirely derived from the play of light and shadow.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Kitty Chou earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Business Administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interior Design from the New York School of Interior Design in 2009. Her photographs have been exhibited in Hong Kong, London, Malta, New York, Paris and Taiwan. In 2013 and 2016 Chou was nominated for the Prix Pictet prize.
