Kien Situ, 金 (Metal) Exhibition Opening @ CIW, Canberra
okri...@gmail.com
Time: 5:30pm – 7pm
Venue: CIW Gallery, Bldg 188, Fellows Lane, ANU
In 金 (Metal), Situ transforms CIW Gallery into a striking environment of rupture and reincarnation. The installation brings together Chinese ink, cement, titanium, and incense ash collected from Taoist temple censers in New South Wales, alongside fragments of the artist’s earlier works. These materials come together in a suspended, charged space—where opposing forces collide and new forms emerge.
In this exhibition, metal is not only literal—the titanium structures invoking the raw material’s geological origins alongside often-invisible systems of global mining and trade—but symbolic: In conversation with ink, cement, and incense ash, metal here refers not only to the substance, but to the philosophical elements that orients space and time in Chinese cosmology.
By placing ancient elements like ash and ink alongside high-tech metals, the artist invites us to consider how the harmonic tensions among different worlds (spiritual and industrial, organic and engineered) can come together in innovative ways.
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About the Artist Kien Situ (b.1990) is an architectonic artist whose practice spans sculpture and space. Informed by his diasporic heritage at the juncture of contemporary global cultural theory with ancient Sinospheric philosophy, he explores matter, ruin, distance, numerology, and time in relation to cultural dislocation.
Drawing from deconstructivist, minimalist, and brutalist spatial methodologies, his work merges ancestral materials with modern techniques. Chinese Mò ink is central to his practice, altered through architectural materials. By displacing and reorienting these elements — while ‘reincarnating’ old works into new forms — he examines the destructive relationality between matter and identity, envisaging the cartography of his practice as an ‘endless, formless ruin.’
Situ has exhibited at Artspace, 4A, Passage, The University of Sydney amongst other local institutions. In 2025, he will be showing at the Australian National University, Bankstown Arts Centre, Nasha Gallery, and undertaking an artist residency at Bundanon. He will also be presenting an artwork for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Intelligens for HOME at the Australian Pavilion.
He holds a Bachelor of Architecture (UNSW, 2016) and a Masters of Architecture (USYD, 2025).
Image credit
Kien Situ, artwork detail, 2025
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Australian Centre on China in the World · Fellows Lane, Building 188 · Acton, ACT 2601 · Australia
