2K1.0: The First Chapter of a Collaborative Project with Kai Chan in 2017
2K is a collaborative project between Kai Chan and me, initiated in April 2017. Early that year, or perhaps in late 2016, I suggested to Kai that we work together, possibly presenting an exhibition once a year. The title was my idea, with “K” standing for the first letter of each of our first names.
We also share the same birthday month. Kai is fourteen years older than I am, but we have certain things in common, both in character and in artistic interests. Some of my works from the 1980s share affinities with his later works, particularly in the arrangement of objects with multiple vanishing points. We are both fond of recycling, too, although in different ways: Kai through his use of materials, and I through the recycling of images.
Kai belongs to a circle of close friends I came to know after moving to Toronto, alongside Tomio Nitto, Gary Michael Dault, and Bob Black. They did not share the first half of Holly’s and my creative history, but that does not make their place in our lives any less significant than that of friends such as Ching-Ping and Ping-Kwan, whom we had known since our earlier years. Friendships formed at different stages of life carry their own histories and meanings.
Kai did not visit our first gallery, located at the Candy Factory Lofts. We eventually met at our second space, at 50 Gladstone Avenue. He had heard about the gallery earlier but, as he later told us, had avoided visiting for a rather ridiculous reason. Fortunately, that did not prevent us from becoming good friends once we discovered our shared interests. Kai was also a very close friend of Holly’s.
In our early years in Toronto, Holly and I published the Canadian Photo Guide, a semi-monthly publication, as well as ARTPOST.info, a web-based source of art information. We visited gallery exhibitions frequently, and it was during those years that we discovered Kai’s work and became very fond of it, long before we met him in person.
Around 2014 or 2015, we organized ART BROWNIE, a project inviting artists to make small-format works using standard wooden blocks measuring 2.5 × 2.5 inches, which we supplied. We invited Kai to participate, and this became our first direct collaboration. He produced a particularly interesting piece, which we acquired during the exhibition. It now sits beside Holly, a small but enduring memento of our friendship. In the years that followed, Kai took part in many of our group projects and presented solos at our gallery.
The first chapter of our collaboration was titled 2K1.0. It also carried a Chinese subtitle, 2想天開 (“Two Trying to Unlock the Sky”). The phrase was borrowed from 異想天開, an expression suggesting fantastical or wildly imaginative ideas. The playful alteration suited the spirit of our undertaking. “Unlock” is also the meaning of his name Kai (啟) in Chinese.
For this collaboration, Kai selected some of my earlier works, including images I had published as postcards and others in inkjet printouts. In return, he gave me a shoebox filled with raw objects to photograph. These oddly shaped things, almost like fragments of Dadaist nonsense language, could acquire new meanings when photographed and juxtaposed with other images. Through this process, they became additions to my visual vocabulary, opening up possibilities that I might not otherwise have encountered.
In this issue of ARCHIVE, we are publishing the complete set of exhibition documentation images, which should cover most of the works in the series. In the original exhibition, each piece carried its own title. Those titles are missing from the documentation gathered here. When I eventually compile a book on the series, I hope to restore this missing information.
2K remains an ongoing collaboration. In November 2026, Kai and I will present the seventh episode of the project.