nowhere left but here, here i am again

Project: Sissi Kaplan with Tomson Chan, Sam I-shan, Vivian Wang, and Cyril Wong

Curated by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu
Artists’ Book Library at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, 21/3-17/8/2025

nowhere left but here, here i am again is a project in two phases: “nowhere left but here” (begins 21 March) assembles a group of international contemporary artists who use letters, maps, postcards, stamps, and other printed materials as the basis for their work. As mediums often associated with conceptual art practices, their presence here not only serves as a means of corresponding over great distances, but as sites through which to document and share the artists’ most intimate moments.

The second phase, “here i am again” brings in additional publications to complement the landmark exhibition, On Kawara: Rule of Freedom, Freedom of Rules (23 May–17 Aug 2025) at Tai Kwun Contemporary. Co-curated by Hou Hanru and Ying Kwok, it is the first institutional solo presentation of On Kawara’s work in Asia and the first since his passing in 2014, including several of his most iconic series spanning five decades.

In an age where the “self” is endlessly asserted and negated through its presence online, these artists choose “print technology” as a creative tool to communicate. Theirs is an enigmatic, if unending search to capture or “map” connectivity, and to acknowledge times of anxiety through these concrete forms acting as surrogates for themselves and their respective realities. This cartographic impulse not only gives shape to personal encounters with their work but highlights how art in print endures as a mode of self-expression by serving as carriers of our singular and shared experiences.

I Am Still Here (2020)
Hong Kong-based artist Sissi Kaplan, alongside Vivian Wang and Cyril Wong, collaborated on the film, I Am Still Here, which features found footage of animals in their natural habitats. Originally sourced from a National Geographic documentary, the artist upends the tension normally found between hunter and prey species through an editing process which suggests a greater sense of intimacy and care between them.  

Elsewhere, there are clips of Kaplan who fades in, then out at different times within a desolate, quasi-futuristic landscape, as a soundtrack by Vivian Wang and a poem by Cyril Wong, punctuates these scenes capturing the artist’s surreal wanderings.

Ultimately, I Am Still Here strikes an uneasy balance between realms, where, “alienation, solitude and [the] quest for meaning are juxtaposed with the natural instincts of animals and the invariable trajectories of planets hinting at a larger system of time and space, gesturing at alternative possibilities of navigating the world.” This sentiment not only echoes through the words On Kawara used, such as “I Am Still Alive” to assert his presence in the world, but in taking a similar tack as Kaplan, both highlight how art traverses across space and time, even if how this may take shape in future is unknowable to any artist beyond their lifetimes.

Inflatables (2015-present)
In her ongoing photography series Inflatables, Sissi Kaplan documents the parked vehicles being shielded by protective fabric covers, which she encounters on her travels. The resulting images of automobiles are the same insofar as the artist’s approach to their subject, yet with slight variations – this “camouflaging” makes each appear abstract within the various situations that Kaplan discov­ers them.

Turning her photos into postcards this time, both to facilitate personal and worldwide inter­connectivity, the work also extends the history of art in print, and shares a sensibility connecting her work to that of On Kawara.