People Mountain People Sea
20.03.2024 - 28.07.2024
Oi! Gallery, 12 Oil Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
“People Mountain People Sea” is an exploration of Gary Card’s visually joyful “Chinglish” through a re-imagined blending of Eastern and Western iconography."
Referencing the popular Chinglish idiom, the show takes on elements of duality, of re-interpreted meanings and the potential for new inspiration to arise from one culture to another, creating an experience that encourages one to re-discover the familiar with fresh eyes.
For Gary, the term “People Mountain People Sea” brings to mind an exuberance or vibrancy — as experienced in his initial research trip to Hong Kong in 2023. The exhibition channels his desire to capture this through his artistic medium and spatial sensibilities as a celebrated set designer, combined with a distinctive aesthetic Gary has developed through the years.
In an approach that the artist refers to as “barnacles of time”, sculptures and paintings have become encrusted with objects both familiar and abstract. This seemingly unconscious layering of history, styles and forms observed in Gary’s artworks sits in direct parallel to his observance and interpretation of Hong Kong’s rich physical and cultural landscape.
“The figures in the series hint at the dichotomies between commercial/sacred, cartoon/realism, East/West. Not only that, they all play on this ‘barnacles of time’ idea, where these figures whether sacred or banal have all been dragged through timespace, picking up everything and anything along the way, in turn becoming something new in the process. There is a degree of the initial recognisable form that is still visible but whether or not they still retain their original meaning and purpose is for the viewer to decide.
These sculptures are similar to the philosophical idea of the Ship of Theseus — if every part of the sculpture has over time been replaced by another, is it still its original form or something entirely new?
A lot of the items featured in the sculptures come from photographs taken around my Hong Kong visit in 2023 as well as combining sculptures/designs from past bodies of work in magazine editorials and advertisements, kitsch souvenirs and graphics taken from old magazines and the internet.”
-Gary Card
highlights
