Tang Kwong San: Rootstock opening September 12, 2024.

gdm Hong Kong proudly presents Tang Kwong San: Rootstock, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Using the bauhinia plant as the main motif, Rootstock approaches diasporic identity like a sterile plant that is grafted from intergenerational histories. Through graphite drawings, oil paintings, handmade objects, photography, and installation, Tang’s new work navigates between deconstruction and reconstruction, examining how the tissues of our identities are splintered and joined.

Born in Dongguan in 1992, Tang immigrated to Hong Kong with his father when he was five years old. His mother joined them five years later. Straddling between two homes, between colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong, Tang’s work is saturated with a sense of loss and grief.

First discovered in Hong Kong by a French Catholic Missionary in 1880, the bauhinia × blakeana is also known as the Hong Kong Orchid. Unable to self-reproduce, the bauhinia plant can only be propagated through grafting. In a series of new paintings, Tang maps connections between the dependent nature of the bauhinia and his diasporic identity, which often feels circumstantially shaped and not easily defined.

Tang continues to weave between personal and collective histories in his graphite sketches. In a two-part work, Tang depicts an inverted cow’s head and body respectively. Both pieces are based on a cast of a cow figurine Tang found in a garbage dump near his studio. Part of a larger set of Catholic statues depicting the Birth of Jesus, the cow figure is at once an allusion to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong and a reference to his late mother’s birthday—both occurring in the year of the ox. Through contrasting shades of black and white, the animal’s form is made out from negative, rather than positive space. That is to say, its presence is recognized through its absence.

Moving beyond the graphite medium, The Brass Ax & Blakeara (2024) is a video work featuring the artist repeatedly chopping at a bauhinia tree. Originally an award to Hong Kong firefighters, the blunt axe Tang uses is a relic of the British colonial era. The brass axe is also a nod to the Aesop fable “The Honest Woodcutter,” a cautionary tale about the need to be honest in spite of self-interest. Unlike the parable, honesty is not always rewarded in real life—one could even argue that the opposite is usually true. Tang’s repetitive and at times seemingly futile actions reflect a sense of desperation and resignment in the face of such disillusionment.

In an act of reconstruction, Tang encases moth specimens in the resin walls of Wishing Pond (2024). Homophonic with the Cantonese term for “I,” or ngo, moths are scattered around the water-less well as if mid-flight. The self, containing fractured multitudes, is transformed into a vessel for wish-making. It is also a vessel of commemoration, as the winged insects are often seen as the spirits of loved ones in Chinese folklore. Like “I,” the name of Tang’s late mother includes a homophone of the Cantonese word for moth.

Through found objects and transposed plants, Rootstock examines the familial, social, and historical fragments that forge one’s identity. In the echoes of Tang’s destruction and under his painstaking documentation, these fragments are rejoined in a sublimation of grief and ultimately, hope.