Tiffany Sia: Slippery When Wet - Artists Space Favorite 

Slippery When Wet proposes a wet ontology of Hong Kong—a city in ongoing transfiguration shifting into an uncanny vision of itself. Hong Kong secretes, leaving a trail of ink, tears, humidity, logistic flows, and leaks. The works herein usurp these fraught channels to make the shortest distance between two places: between New York and Hong Kong; between Artists Space and Speculative Place (the artist’s residency program and project space on Lamma Island). Within the installation, an obsessive material accumulation suggests spectatorship, reading, and viewing as discursive sites between geographies.

Emanating from the newly published Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕, these works on paper and in moving image propose a poetics through a multitude of temporal frames. Across a series of ten THREADS, they wrestle with the slipperiness of the original place as it recedes into the imaginary: An image of the Hong Kong skyline flickers as a projection in a lounge space. From March 14–20th, a weeklong, episodic live-streamed landscape film broadcasts both at Artists Space and online, marking the changeover to daylight savings when New York and Hong Kong are in exact antipodes in timezone. A row of books‬ serves as the show’s vertebrae, and sits as a mirrored barrier on a shelf, slowly disappearing over time. A three-channel video cycles through archival weather reports. Humidity accumulates on the windows. A blank scroll precariously blows in the vestibule. One scrolls through a seemingly endless, and authorized, full leak of Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕 on dot-matrix paper.

The haptics of moving images and paper precipitate, tracing a slippery outline of relations, timelines, and place. Sia asks, "How can I dig your way to Hong Kong?"