I saw Lee Kit at the Osage Gallery when I was living in Hong Kong, and I recently stumbled across the photographs I took during the opening in 2010. I don't remember what I thought about it at the time, but now it feels very relevant.
Each cloth is hand-painted, and they have been used for 'mundane' or everyday activities, such as washing a window, or being hung up as curtains, or being slept on, in a bed.
When I saw these photographs again I realized that yes, this is perfect, this is exactly what I want to do!
In particular in terms of mundane everyday objects which have been made so particularly and beautifully. Just the idea of using a hand-painted cloth to wash a dirty window - why would you do it? It seems like a waste, but I like that so much. It is not so much invisible labour as it is something else... Failure, maybe? To use something in a way it should not be used. Of course, by putting them in a gallery setting they become those art objects again, and I don't know what to think of it (I suppose I like it. Ridiculous not to).
But yes, I like the idea of failure, failure to do something, failure to realize something. A failure to use this object as it was meant to be used, or a failure to revere a beautiful piece of art, but rather, you sleep on it. That is the other thing I am so attracted to: sleeping on the cloth, making an impression of it. It makes me think about Do-Ho Suh's Home-series, where memory is embedded in the cloth, but it works in a different way. He uses the fabric to depict these interior and exterior spaces, and we can even walk around inside of them. Lee Kit, it seems, uses it more as a kind of... wasted labour. I am interested in this, this 'waste of labour' (no, definitively not about invisibility of labour), but I am even more interested in the memory we can embed into cloth. When I weave, the weaving is not finished when I take it off the loom or even when it is shown, and now it has traveled and lived with me for almost half a year, and I still have not 'used' it for anything. But I want it to be something, so I am sending it to Jordyn, and then we will see what happens.
Later on, I would like to make another weaving, and design it specifically so I can make pillow cases out of it. I think it will be a very simple design and form, probably white cotton plain weave, but the size will be so that I can get a set number of pillow cases from it.
I feel like I am returning to things I used to think about, and ideas that began germinating when I was in Hong Kong, and I didn't think I would. I was trying to find back to the form of what I was making, but instead the ideas looped back on themselves.
(all the photographs are taken by me)