Bruce Quek
The driving force underlying Quek's recent work remains an obsession with cities – these super-dense concatenations of infrastructure (both street and hyperlink), which define us as much as we define them. This obsession stems in turn from William Gibson's own interest in the Walled City of Kowloon as a sort of exemplary city – compounding generations of ad hoc organic growth, from which emerge the sort of strangeness and serendipity that would be all but impossible in a non-urban environment. In essence, the artist is driven to understand the possibilities and consequences that emerge from human populations being enmeshed in physical and informational networks of exponentially increasing density. This overriding obsession is most evident in two major series by the artist, »The Hall of Minors« (ongoing, from 2011), and the »Consider();« series (ongoing, from 2013).
The Hall of Minors (2011–)
The »Hall of Minors« addresses the limits of empathy in an age of informational supersaturation (and the hollowness of art-activist responses to it), in the form of a collection of clocks ceaselessly chiming the rates of occurrence of all manner of atrocities – rapes, murders, deaths by preventable disease, ecological catastrophes, et cetera. The »Consider();« series, which may be seen as the direct forerunner of »Auspex«, poses a simple question: What if the roles – both mythopoeic and mundane – of the stars had been supplanted by our own constellations of artificial lights?Auspex (2016)
