CAN X TWo temple place
Site-specific Digital GROUP Exhibition, 2021
Exhibiting Artists: Donald Shek, Chloe Wing, Jack Tan, and Jasmin Kent-Rodgman
Curators: Rebecca Hone, Jodie Gilliam
Exhibition Space Designer: Christine Urquhart
CAN × Two Temple Place was a site-specific digital exhibition developed for the Chinese Arts Now Festival 2021. Originally conceived as a live, physical exhibition at Two Temple Place, the project was reimagined in response to COVID-19 restrictions as a fully virtual environment, requiring new modes of exhibition-making and audience participation.
The exhibition space, digitally modelled by Christine Urquhart, reconstructed Two Temple Place as a navigable virtual environment. This digital architecture functioned not only as an exhibition space but also as a stage for a promenade-based experience, allowing audiences to enter the exhibition as online avatars and move collectively through the space. In doing so, the project transformed the exhibition into a form of digital theatre, blurring boundaries between gallery, performance, and virtual scenography.
The exhibition engaged with the layered histories of Two Temple Place, an architectural fantasia built by William Waldorf Astor, himself part of a prominent immigrant dynasty. Astor’s family history-from migration from rural Germany to America in the late eighteenth century, to the accumulation of wealth and property; provided a critical lens through which participating artists explored themes of migration, power, ownership, and representation.
The development of this digital promenade space directly informed Shek’s subsequent work, feeding into the conceptual and spatial foundations of Home X, an experimental theatre project exploring home, belonging, and virtual world-building.
Heaven’s Scrolls, Single Colour Screenprint on cotton and alloy sheeting, Jan 2021.
HEAVEN’S SCROLLS
Heaven’s Scrolls raises fundamental questions of identity and perception. Stories from the past are often used to locate meaning within an increasingly complex world, offering frameworks through which individuals seek belonging or understanding. Yet written histories rarely present complete or singular truths. They tend to describe groups rather than individuals, and in doing so may distort, obscure, or erase lived experience.
The work reflects on the tension between historical representation and personal existence. Identity is not solely shaped by what has been recorded; by race, religion, or social classification; but by lived action and embodied experience. It is the act of being at a particular moment in time that carries an authenticity that cannot be replicated or overwritten.
As Charles Cooley’s formulation suggests, “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am”, identity is continually negotiated between self-perception and external projection. Heaven’s Scrolls situates itself within this unstable space, questioning how meaning is constructed, transmitted, and misunderstood across time.
Life of the Body, 4 Colour Screenprint on paper, Jan 2021.
LIFE OF THE BODY
Life of the Body should be read in conjunction with Lover of Life. The works take their names from Lif and Lifthrasir, the female and male figures in Norse mythology who are foretold to survive Ragnarök by sheltering within Hoddmímis holt. After the destruction of the world, they emerge to repopulate a renewed and fertile landscape.
The visual language of the work draws upon mythological cosmology through digital construction. The “mountain” landscapes initially appear as rugged natural forms but are in fact generated through the displacement of Thiessen polygons. Branching structures are derived from simple L-systems, referencing the World Tree that connects multiple realms, from the underworld to the heavens above.
Together, these elements form a speculative garden of the gods, where myth, algorithm, and digital form converge. The work reflects on survival, regeneration, and the continuity of life through cycles of destruction and renewal.
“Don’t mistake the moon, for a finger pointing at the moon.”
Life of the Body, 4 Colour Original Silkscreen Print on Paper, Two Temple Place, London, UK, Jan 2021 (Photo by Johan Persson).
Lover of Life, 4 Colour Screenprint on paper, Jan 2021.
LOVER OF LIFE
Across mythologies, the concept of the axis mundi appears in varied forms; as a column, mountain, or tree, symbolising the connection between heaven and earth, or between higher and lower realms. Psychologically and sociologically, this symbol has been interpreted as arising from a universal human perception of place: the sense that one’s own position occupies the “centre of the world.”
This centre functions as a microcosm of order, familiarity, and meaning. Beyond it lie unknown territories associated with chaos, danger, or dissolution. Yet from this centre, one may journey outward, discovering new realms and establishing new centres as understanding expands.
Lover of Life reflects this vertical and horizontal movement, of ascent, descent, and exploration, capturing a philosophy in which human existence is framed as a continual quest. Through this process, individuals develop insight and transformation, moving beyond the immediate microcosm to engage with a broader macrocosmic order.
As Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”