THROBBING
SOUL

Hong Kong— Odds and Ends is pleased to present Throbbing Soul, a solo exhibition by Hong Kong artist Virginia Lo. The exhibition will be on view from 30th November to 23rd December 2023, with an opening reception on 30th November from 6-9pm.

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Throbbing Soul is an emotive exploration of place memory, a concept intrinsically tied to social displacement, environmental psychology and notions of placelessness. To Lo, the response to placelessness often takes the form of nostalgia, a particularly acute form of place memory incited by sightings of urban objects and architectural landmarks. A particular object of interest to Lo is the soon to be obsolete public telephone booth, an object once intrinsic to our daily lives now rendered irrelevant by new technology. Yet, its looming presence in public spaces offer an interpretation of the story of their existence, giving back echoes of their past. By isolating a single phone booth, Lo bestows in her paintings a narrative power that treats objects in urban environment as mediators through time, communicating basic elements about our society’s material and immaterial culture. 

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Lo’s preoccupation with place memory is rooted in its resistance to geographical and contextual mapping, resulting in paintings that register fractures of existence that are both impossible to negate and impossible to locate. Subject isolation is one of many tools Lo uses to establish an artistic practice in which emotions and personal experiences take on decisive importance. In more ways than one, Lo regards her paintings as forms of text that are open to and rely on viewer’s emotional interpretations. Her paintings are grounded in accounts of memory that emphasise its visceral and emotional qualities, promoting a form of viewing that is personal, relevant and open to negotiated meaning in an otherwise increasingly prescriptive educational world.