Mediation repeatedly emerges as a tactic through which artists disrupt art making practices – not only from a perspective of art history, but also through the reformulation of the artist-object-viewer relationship. Though the idea of “disruption” tends to conjure up visions of chaos and destruction, the mediations and interventions taking place in Splitting circle are more meditative, poetic and cyclical. In this in-between space, the artists – Gailan Ngan, Wayne Ngan, Paul P. & Lam Wong – present material residuals of absent bodies, and engage in practices that disrupt the histories of materials as well as the socio-cultural spaces that house them. The artists’ works act as archives of gesture, feeling or an impression made by or for the body: the subject is always present, if not always visible.
