Objects Residency Project #1
For two weeks this summer, Objects×4 hosted its first residency with two artists in the South of France. The artists include Orange Terry (@orangeterry), a sculptor and designer, and Elton Fun (@freedomgum) , a photographer and videographer, both have built their practices entirely in Hong Kong, a city whose density and material excess have shaped everything they make. The residency removed that foundation, questioning what their practices would do when their familiarity was taken away.
The first week was spent learning about and finding inspiration within the region. We travelled to nearby towns and along the coast, to Porquerolles, where Fondation Carmignac held the group exhibition VERTIGO, and to Hyères, where we took a tour of the modernist Villa Noailles. Alongside the art, we had also visited nearby vineyards and toured the winemaking processes that are central to the region.
Then came the time to begin working on the pieces. Since Terry works from found objects, something Hong Kong provides in endless supply, the South of France, we discovered, discards almost nothing. The streets offered him nothing to work with, but instead, the region is famous for its markets, every town has its own and they’re hosted almost every day. At these markets, you’ll find anything from incredible century old family heirlooms In the form of jewelry or crests, to space age Sputnik newspaper racks, or old postcards, stamps, boxes… These formed the residency’s backbone as the market mornings became part of real studio time.
The region kept offering material inspiration in unexpected forms. At the vineyards, Terry became fixated not on the wine but on the effect it had in the large basins that were used to carry it, the deep red residue that settles at the bottom of the containers. He began treating wine as a stain and saturating wood with it, a local pigment the region produces by the tonne.
We shared every meal of the residency, and the table inspired a work of its own. Early on, Terry and Elton introduced us to Coca Cola chicken, a Hong Kong home cooking classic, and since the house kept chickens, the dish became a collision of the two. The resulting collaboration brings together Elton’s photographs of the chicken with the Coca Cola, the recipe itself, and a piece of Terry’s wine-stained wood, Hong Kong’s kitchen and the Var’s vineyard fixed into a single object. It is the most autobiographical work of the residency, a record of two weeks of eating together, with coca cola chicken appearing most frequently on the menu.
Terry is best known for his critique of waste, most famously the work in which a stack of identical chairs is glued into one mass and sliced back down to the profile of a single chair, excess rendered literally. At the markets we found stackable chairs of exactly the kind the piece requires, and he adapted the idea to them with the same process.
His final work came from the markets’ most abundant offering. Every market, we noticed, was full of boxes, whether wooden crates, cases, containers of every size, sold in large quantities. Terry decided to create a table made up of these boxes combined into a single functioning piece of furniture, complete with a Kleenex box built into its side. It is classic Terry, a contemporary design rebuilt from traditional pieces that were already there.
Elton’s role in all of this was double. He was there to document Terry’s works, the markets and the residency itself. However the markets left him with a work of his own. Among the stalls he landed on an adjustable mannequin arm, the kind made for shop displays, its fingers posable. He set it into a middle finger and began pointing it at the vendors, photographing their reactions one by one. This series is the residency’s direct exchange with the place itself using the found object turned back on the very people who sell such things, and the vendors, usually the ones watching, are caught, for once, on the other side. It is also the funniest work of the two weeks, and the one that best captures what the markets became to us, a cast of incredible characters.
