Sailing on a mirror: Leung Mee Ping’s "In Search of Insomnious Sheep"
Samantha Culp
Courtest of the artist
It was a quiet opening for a quiet work. Down at Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor, thousands crowded the piers to watch October National Day fireworks bounce off the night sky, but at 1a Space in To Kwa Wan, a boat made of mirrors reflected only an empty room. Despite holiday fanfare elsewhere, Cattle Depot’s latest premiere was as calm as its content–Leung Mee-ping’s full-sized rowboat constructed from glass mirrors, displayed alongside the video documentation of its "performance" a few weeks earlier.
For one weekend in September, members of the general public were invited to take a mirror-boat cruise off the shore of Tai Mei Tuk (in Hong Kong’s New Territories). One person at a time could board the seemingly-impossible craft (which was then towed around by a larger yacht) and simply float until they’d had their fill. Which took quite a while for some participants. Most participants appear in the video (shot from a third boat) for just a few moments, enjoying their brief escape from dry land and daily life, but some are in no hurry to return. Mee-ping described one man who decided to stay for a couple of hours, getting so comfortable in his surreal new milieu that he immediately made himself right at home.
"Is that guy naked?" I asked, squinting at the projection on the wall.
"Yes," she answered matter-of-factly.
Looking at the actual boat, which seems sad, beached in the gallery space, it’s easier to imagine why one might strip down while sailing it. Peer over the side, and there is your face and the ceiling where the boat should be. It is a vessel in every sense of the word–a space waiting to be filled, a blank beckoning its opposite, a door or window leading to another place. The video reveals that from a distance, the boat nearly disappears, or at least becomes the point at which human and ocean begin to blur. Seated in the boat itself, sky and ocean distort into one, and the body of the passenger is almost an afterthought. The effect is primal, elemental, weighted: as if air and water were dreaming of one another, and we somehow got stuck in between.
