Pol Wah Tse — Final Hot Desert

Pol Wah Tse

Flat 3, 5 Bowman’s Mews
London, United Kingdom

February 24, 2024 - March 23, 2024

On the perfectly smooth surface of a water that no longer has the desire to ripple in accordance to its nature, a cluster of five stars appears reflected in the far sky. Like the chemical residue of fireworks attempting to descend back to earth, the stars glide down at their own pace. Their luminescent heads are trailed by a comet tail accompanying their every move. In the blink of an eye the stars dart past the clouds and into the foreground while they elegantly choreograph their positions, adopting a formation that closely resembles that of migrating birds. Plunging their bodies at high speed in the direction of the water that now rests beneath them, they scrape its surface with their talons, splitting liquid.

A word will always refer to an assigned thing in a person’s mind. In conversation, successfully conveying your definition and use of a word reaffirms your individual sense of your own correct understanding of the world and its operations. However, during a miscommunication, when your concept is challenged and you are proven to have used a word by an incorrect definition that you held to be true, your perception of the world and its contents temporarily becomes at odds with itself. Your understanding of what the world is made of is jumbled ever so slightly and they look back at their past misuses and misplaced confidence with a tinge of shame and vertigo.1

Over the last year, Pol Wah Tse’s practice has primarily focused on wall based works that almost always feature oil painted colour fields. However, despite this focus on wall hanging, painting-adjacent production, he still adamantly refers to himself as a sculptor. Pol Wah Tse is a sculptor fascinated by the properties of painting. A critical and calculated miscommunication occurs in this realm, between the materials and their shapes and the sharp history and identity of painting. The essential realm of miscommunication is the space in which the pattern-finding of language is experienced.2 Before hue there was only the simple division of darkness and lightness. Black and white were the first two colours encoded in language and a need for further categorisation gave way to red, followed by green, yellow and finally blue.3 The sea in Homer’s Odyssey was dark wine and its sky was bronze. The infant learns that it is not its mother, but a separate yet dependent entity. And in adolescence the desire to shed off that dependence and make one’s own use of the world emerges. It’s this state that Pol Wah Tse purposefully moves through. The artist meticulously develops unconventional techniques with oil paint on the materials most readily accessible to the artists hands and mind.

Pol Wah Tse’s painted works in his exhibition at Final Hot Desert aren’t concerned with functioning as paintings, although they may be at first glance interpreted as such. The surfaces of the artworks’ panels create no illusion of depth, but perpetually flatten towards vibration, bringing attention to the oils as a certain texture and medium that rests on the sculpture’s face. The works are butted up next to one another and hung with their tops aligned perfectly level to one another despite their different dimensions. Their installations in the apartment space bridge the gaps of strangely designed architectural nooks, and create long tunnels down their combined lengths when looked at closely from the side. Bubbling pots of acrylic-pigmented water mediate from the floor, playing the foil, this time ripping pockets of air through painting in its liquid state.

- Benjamin Anderson & Marina Moro

1. For example, a thimble as an acorn in Peter Pan.

2. “... communication is meaningful only when it entails misunderstanding, for if there were perfect understanding, the sender and receiver systems would be identical, and no communication would make any difference.” Annila, A. (2023). Philosophy of Thermodynamics. The Royal Society Publishing, 381(2252).

3. Bollbach, M. (2004). Evolution of Color Terminology. Virginia Commonwealth University