Ko Sin Tung has been long creating project-based, site-resonant artworks that systematically deal with social, architectural, and quotidian themes. Her first solo show in Europe, entitled “The clumsy response”, blends in the classicist-brutalist late-GDR architecture of “Die Möglichkeit einer Insel” with an installation of newly produced works. Each series responds to local and universal material cultures, on the semantic and semiotic dimensions of objects that cocoon daily life. Executed with subtle yet sharp humour and an occasionally shimmering warmth, the artist weaves a delicate line of emotion through the technological patterns that define our routines. “The clumsy response” speaks from a position of personal experience in an increasingly algorithmic world.

With the perspective of being born and raised in Hong Kong as a global hub of recent economic and socio-political continental shifts, Ko Sin Tung belongs to a generation of artists who meticulously scan both material dynamics and ruins of economic excess production, failing infrastructures, unlocked neoliberal creative industries and real-estate speculations.Her precise retooling of found materials and detritus is based on experience of impacts and failures of an economical monoculture of growth, which enforces individualism to enfold in an apparently diverse but eventually generic manner. Departing from there, the artist creates her own “clumsy” and systematic response.

After entering the space stepping on a waxed tablecloth and lit by an emergency lighting system with which the space has been stripped down further, the show opens with Puzzle and perplex – the problem solver, a wooden reception counter, deformed and glued drill bits as well as additional items. The work remembers the circulation between creating problems and being their origin as most basic characteristic of human life. Valid possession is a new series of drawings, consisting of rubbed graphite surfaces on found and layered industrial materials. It approaches chasms, such as forced destruction in different parts of the world, combined with an overload of resources observed in urban life, from demolitions of buildings to trash accumulated on streets, generates an inharmonious, distorted reality.

The title-giving series The clumsy response has been inspired by the massive amount of furniture piling up on the streets in Germany which the artist noted after her arrival in 2024. Once intimate items such as mattresses are abandoned and exposed in public spaces as if misplaced. The relinquish ownership of objects signifies a passage or a giving up of attachment, along with the personal history tied to the items. Collected and cut into blocks, silicone has been applied to the foam to seal the incision. Two examples from a series entitled Safety attachment consisting of deranged curtain rails and bucket handles address the movement of the hand while being vertically installed on the wall. The third and last space shows “Furniture of one’s mind”, a new video work of the artist herself writing with a finger, which in a most synesthetic manner explores the limits and obstacles of psychological and physical perception, as “if our mind is a room” as the artist notes.

— Courtesy of Die Möglichkeit einer Insel.