Our daily lives are structured by measurements of time. Calendar systems track the passage of weeks, months, and years, while clocks divide days into hours, minutes, and seconds. Yet, time, as we experience it, resists precise measurement—it can slow down, stretch, accelerate, or even spiral. As an art archive, we are interested in this tension between precision and elusiveness. We often ask ourselves if historical events and art histories have definitive beginnings and endings. And how might artists counter strict chronologies?
Countering Time has grown out of discussions with four artists and writers over the course of six months. The exhibition presents new works by Merve Ünsal, Simon Leung, Gala Porras-Kim, and Lee Weng Choy, who speculate on the immeasurability of time. Merve Ünsal uses her body to record a centuries-old sinkhole where human and geological time collapse. Simon Leung bends and folds the afterlives of a moment captured in a 1967 photograph from Hong Kong. Gala Porras-Kim traces recollections of lost works and archives. Lee Weng Choy uses personal annotations to mark time. Together, they tune in, refract, exhume, and annotate artworks, archival records, and past events, demonstrating how archives are sites of imagination instead of final resting places of historical records.
Public Programmes
Countering Time: In Conversation with Lee Weng Choy, Simon Leung, Gala Porras-Kim, and Merve Ünsal
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2024, 7–8:30pm
Venue: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive
Guided Tours | Countering Time
Date: 26 Nov 2024–18 Feb 2025
Venue: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive
Workshop on zine-making and storytelling through personal archives
Date: Dec 2024
Venue: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive
Talk on past Hong Kong exhibitions about time
Date: Jan 2025
Venue: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive
Performance/Workshop on soundscapes in Hong Kong
Date: Feb 2025
Venue: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive
Lee Weng Choy is an art critic based in Kuala Lumpur. His essays have appeared in journals such as Afterall and anthologies such as Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art (2012), Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (2012), and The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Art in Global Asia (2022). From 2000 to 2009, he was Artistic Co-Director of The Substation in Singapore. Lee has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore. He has worked with various arts organisations, including in-tangible institute, Ilham Gallery, A+ Works of Art, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and National Gallery Singapore.
Simon Leung is an artist based in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. He studied at the University of California Los Angeles, Columbia University, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. His projects include The Side of the Mountain, an ongoing opera set in Los Angeles; a decades-long collaboration with the late Warren Niesłuchowski; art-workers’ theatre (ACTIONS! at the Kitchen, 2013; and ACTIONS!/ADJUNCTS! at the Hammer Museum, 2016); and extended enactments of and meditations on the squatting body, often in relation to Hong Kong, his birthplace. He is Professor and New Genres Area Head at the University of California, Irvine. With Zoya Kocur, he edited Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (2nd Edition, 2012).
Gala Porras-Kim is an artist based in Los Angeles and London. Recently, she held solo exhibitions at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; The Kadist and Amant Foundation, New York; Gasworks, London; Leeum Museum and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), and the Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020–22). Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), the Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021), and Liverpool Biennial (2023).
Merve Ünsal is an artist based in Istanbul and Santa Cruz. Most recently, she held a solo exhibition, Intimations, at AVTO (Istanbul, 2024). She is the Founding Editor of m-est.org, a publication focused on artist-centred publishing. She has participated in the learning programme Homework Space at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; and artist residency programmes at the Delfina Foundation, London; Praksis, Oslo; Fogo Island Arts; Art Metropole, Toronto; and University of Delaware, Lewes. She received her MFA from Parsons School of Design in Photography and Related Media, and her BA from Princeton University in Art and Archaeology. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Countering Time is curated by Özge Ersoy, Rebecca Tso, Ruby Weatherall, and Lily Wong, with support from Paul C. Fermin, Christopher K. Ho, Hazel Kwok, Christy Li, Sneha Ragavan, and Anthony Yung. We would like to thank our Curatorial Intern Ember Ye.
Graphic Design: MAJO
Media Partners: ArtReview and Mousse
The exhibition is generously supported by Mimi Brown & Alp Erçil, Eunei & Ron Lee, Tracy Li, and Virginia & Wellington Yee.
Merve Ünsal’s research and production is supported by Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence and Equity and Kenneth R. Corday & Family Endowment in Writing for Television & Film, University of California, Santa Cruz.
