Untitled #18 (from the series Solar Caress)

Description

These drawings grew from ideas Pak Keung Wan has been exploring through the Spolvero technique. A method used to transfer a drawing onto another surface by pricking into the original trace and dabbing powder through the holes, Spolvero offered a motif to suggest the porosity of bodies and where a sense of self is fused with an-other. Flowing around this intimate overlay of bodies was Wan’s fascination with Harmonic Patterns, celestial dances created by the gravitational pull of two planetary bodies as their rotational forces are visualised. This technique also allowed him to explore the material and visual qualities inherent to the different media being employed and their ‘compatibility’ with the various paper surfaces, some of which are nearly a century old. In the dusty, opaque sheen of graphite, the sultry stubbornness of a china-graph, the twinkling web-like delicacy of a metallic pencil, such qualities of medium connect to how Wan has come to relate to each figure. These postcards have been up on the wall of his studio for some time and are selected because, like the moons towards the planets, he feels a certain attraction towards the people in them. These are bodies around which he circulates, exchange glances, converse across the ether.