Lost in the city by Astrid Cheung
"The living hell is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the hell that we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways not to suffer. The first is easy for many: to accept hell and become part of it to the point of no longer seeing it. The second is risky and requires continuous attention and deepening: seeking and knowing how to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and making it last, and giving it space."
This is how Italo Calvino describes cities in his book Invisible Cities. Impossible not to see a relationship between the point of view of the famous writer and the young artist Astrid Cheung, whose works revolve around the themes of city life and the relationship between man and the world, like in the artwork Lost in the city.
The artist’s vision of urban space consists in the city seen as a labyrinth that imprisons the human being, as a delimited space where the geometric order of architecture and the network of human relationships are intertwined, from which derives the alienating interpretation of man within it.
Her pictorial language describes a black and white world with a result of strong emotional and visual impact: a surreal and hypnotic cosmos in which human beings move on parallel orbits without ever meeting.
Key point of the vision of the city as a cage is the loss of identity of the individual who inhabits it, in search of himself but also of his role in relation to others, which defines society itself. Precisely the image of the labyrinth represents the challenge and complexity of humankind, within one’s existence, towards a necessary analysis and investigation of oneself, but also of others, and for its own indispensable evolutionary process. Labyrinth intended on several fronts, from the emotional to the experiential sphere. It is inevitable to lose the compass between this very hesitant intertwining, which in everyday reality ends up overtaking the individual until it is destroyed.
The inhabitant of the city, immersed in a concrete forest, loses the ability to see the "trees; he himself, like every other single component of reality, loses relevance and identity in favor of the great urban organism that dominates every aspect of social life.
