Art Basel Hong Kong 2021

Capsule Shanghai is pleased to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong 2021 presenting Leelee Chan's most recent solo project Pallet in Repose (Resurfacer), consisting of four new sculptures which continue and expand the ideas and forms behind her 'Pallet in Repose' series, initiated during her solo show 'Core Sample' (2019) at Capsule Shanghai.

Leelee Chan’s sculptures embrace the hybridity of natural and industrial materials from her urban surroundings. She generates idiosyncratic and intimate living entities embedded with playful details that unfold upon close inspection.

Chan's inspiration for Pallet in Repose (Resurfacer) came from witnessing construction workers breaking off a huge number of asphalt pieces from a hard tennis court at the Indian Recreation Club in Causeway Bay in Hong Kong. This scenario revealed layers of different substances which provoked an uncanny mixture of an archaeological site and a post-apocalyptic landscape. Pallets, such as those used in Chan's sculptures, have also a particular meaning in the history of Hong Kong, a city which first gained global significance as a global trading port. During her childhood, the artist grew up overseeing a 24-hour container port in Hong Kong from her apartment window.

Created for economical purposes, the plastic pallets and hard tennis court serve as a 'surface' for human activity, and yet share the fate of a limited lifespan of functionality. The discarded asphalt pieces were piled up and readied to be buried underneath a new road. The artist salvaged selected asphalt pieces from the site and integrated them inside of a cube composed by seven plastic pallets standing upright, so as to reveal its manipulated inner structure upon closer inspection. In three wall sculptures, Circuit (Green Jasper), Hazy Blue Silhouette, and Nocturnal Encounter, Chan similarly evokes notions of the architectural and cosmological, and the geological and mechanical. Here, the artist purposely reinvigorates the inherent structure of fragmented plastic pallets with a painterly approach while embedding stainless steel, mirror, and bronze elements.