Past Continuous Tense

Lam Tung Pang’s Past Continuous Tense presents a forest reminiscent of the monochromatic ink and brush landscape paintings in traditional East Asian art. Indeed, each tree here is a fragment from works by old masters of ink painting, which Lam photocopied from art history books, rendered in life-size with charcoal and blowtorch, and assembled into this composition of a monumental grove.

This multi-layered reproduction process gives a nod to the revered tradition of copying in East Asian art, which suggests that as one copies a past work, one also connects the present to the past, not only to the singular original work but also to the many others who attempt to copy it. But Lam provides a sly critique as well: by featuring modern mechanical reproductive methods, he foregrounds the present time in our encounter with the past tradition; by using plywood, a common and mass-produced material, instead of fine paper or silk, he poses challenges to the elitism and exclusivity that traditional ink painting portends; by including artists of diverse nationalities, the work also defies the monolithic construct of national identity in Asian art history and the tendency to obliterate differences among East Asian arts in the West.

Lam adds finishing touches by inflicting upon this plywood forest traces of fire and marks of violence, destruction, death, and erasure. Some trees are fallen to the ground. They remind us not only of continuous cycles of life and death in nature, but the pressing ecological concerns and political turmoil in our present social reality. It is also a forest reflecting on the construction of history, composed of replicas of fragments and continuously reordered by present and future interventions.

“One cannot think about the future without
knowing the past; but one who knows not
how to connect the past with the present has
no future to think about.” —LAM TUNG PANG