olivier: An O and Their ABC (American Born Cat)
No one can ever accuse olivier of too much information. It constitutes and dictates the body of their work. In all shapes and sizes. Any kind related to what is written, drawn, printed, published, marked, whether words or numbers, in Chinese or English or other languages.
Which at its roots are linguistics. For the artist is infatuated by its components to analyze and deconstruct so as to translate it as form: sentence as physical structure, material to construct into sculptural installation. And what the viewer sees is a singular piece addressing the politics of the room, or museum if you will. That then begs the question olivier poses of what it means to their relocated Cantonese self and us.
Part wordsmith, architect, engineer, the artist builds up what becomes an information superhighway of sorts throughout the interior to that effect. Not the internet per se as in the World Wide Web, to use older terminology but something just as ephemeral yet more tangible. Activating the walls, curving around the baseboard, hanging overhead and even sprawling out into the library to harken and in search of their native Hong Kong cityscape.
But something about how they see such flow of what surrounds and pervades us informs their process to gather, organize, frame, bracket so it takes shape embedded not only as syntactical and indexical but also poetic, almost allegorical in its whimsy.
Both intuitive and logical, on and off the page, they collect data to create systems, construct networks, skeins of facts compiling text, notes and illustrations that hints at their nationality, their identity especially outside a so-called special administrative region bespeaking of the “one country, two systems” framework.