He Knows Me ‘I see hands, someone’s feet, or someone’s faces... as if they were detached from the body. As if they were telling their own stories about love and hate. The hands do talk. A moment was frozen, captured, and then prolonged. The moment even anger and hate froze to some kinds of quietness. As if, something was repeatedly chopped and cut up to a state that, only the sound and motion remained.’

Massimo De Carlo is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in London by the artist Lee Kit, who was born in Hong Kong and now lives and works in Taipei.

Lee Kit’s work encompasses a wide array of mediums that include painting, drawing, video, installations and hand-painted cloths. Lee’s signature pastel palette translates and enhances the apparently cryptic but profound investigations and reflections on the habits and traces that shape the practice of every day life, with the array of ever-changing emotions that it encompasses.

He Knows Me arises from the desire to explore the relationship between hate and fear, and to translate into art how the two feelings co-exist, are voiced and take shape. As put by Lee Kit: “First you have fear and then you have hate. You’re scared about yourself first, and of that person, that issue that makes you feel hate. And then, as a result, you might want to do something crazy...I don’t mean I would do anything crazy, like kill someone, suddenly, but I could have that thought, that vision and feel a need to take a step back, and express it in a different way.”

The basement of the gallery is transformed by the artist in an unsettling and sinister yield where pieces of a human body, feet, hands and fingers stand out from shady paintings on paper evoking what could be our worst nightmare - how far could our fear take us, what horrible actions could hate bring us to do? If we let fear and hate reign our lives, could we be able to chop someone - or something - in to pieces to get rid of them?

The answers to these questions are found exclusively in the viewers mind. The projectors and the light they create insert us into the plot through the shadows: “ When you walk closer, to look at the details, you are entering the projection because you see your own shadow. It’s like a smack on the face: don’t look at the details, look at yourself. You are seeing yourself.”

The viewer is confronted with the voicing of a universal feeling, which becomes particular only through the experience of entering the work in itself. Our own life and experience becomes the source and inspiration for the structure of the composition, providing us with the creative tools to concoct a personal narrative: whether it might be daunting or joyful.

In He Knows Me Lee Kits continues his exploration of the human sphere of emotions. Site specific compositions become the medium that allow the artist to construct and control the complicated realm of empathy and daily experiences, where each painting opens a dialogue, which can be both uncomfortable and uplifting at the same time, around the notions of feeling, accepting and ultimately, being human.