DE SARTHE is pleased to announce its seventh annual de Sarthe Artist Residency (deSAR) as well as its resident artist, Chan Ka Kiu (b. 1995 in Toronto, Canada. Lives and works in Hong Kong.) The artist will create new artworks using the gallery as her studio, which will be open to the public during normal gallery hours throughout the duration of the residency. deSAR runs from June 28th to September 8th and will culminate in a 3-week exhibition opening September 9th.

During the residency, the artist will transform the gallery space into an immersive dialogue surrounding the topic of the notorious “27 Club” - an informal list of popular musicians, artists, actors, and other celebrities who died at age 27. To comprise a series of poetically crafted installations, videos, and wall works, the residency is the artist’s facetious yet pensive response to turning 27 years old herself.

Marrying the familiar with the bizarre, Chan Ka Kiu will create a living room setting within the gallery and fill it with fictitious inhabitants. An expression of both jealousy and gratefulness, the artist contemplates through the residency her conflicting desire for fame, fortune, but also the longevity to find her reason for being beyond the former.

About deSAR

Inaugurated in 2017, de Sarthe's open-studio residency takes place in its 10,000sq/foot space in Hong Kong's art district, Wong Chuk Hang. In a city known for excessively high rent and exceedingly small spaces, the residency allows Hong Kong-based artists the freedom of a large arena to explore their creativity and actively encourages audiences to witness as well as potentially participate in the process of making art. The residency program aggressively challenges the conventional transition of dynamics between artists' studios and galleries--subverting both the notion of privacy within creation and altering the nature of a gallery space.