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Art galleries and exhibitions in Hong Kong
Initially, it seems baffling that David Mach would unveil a solo exhibition at The Cat Street Gallery, on Hollywood Road. Let’s not forget that this is the Turner-nominated sculptor and installation artist whose early work, Adding Fuel to the Fire, was made from a truck, numerous cars, and hundreds of magazines. Since then he’s created vast, critically acclaimed sculptures, either in the public realm or in massive museum shows. So what on Earth of his would be small enough to fit in this modestly sized space?
A conversation with the artist from his London studio reveals that in fact it will be a show of sculptures – in the compact form of collage. “We’ve got about seven collages, well-known iconic images,” he explains in his thick Scottish accent. “We’ve done the Queen, Sean Connery would you believe, a beautiful Chinese girl, a Chinese flag.”
Mach is famed for making works of astonishing beauty from everyday materials, from vast sculptures made from thousands of coat hangers, to large installations made entirely of matches. This time he’s working with postcards. The artist has organised thousands of postcards of Hong Kong and other cities to be sent to his London base – he and his team of assistants have set about creating striking, iconic images that contain cunning double images. The Queen collage, for example is made of thousands of copies of a postcard featuring Elvis Presley. “These collages are a lot of work; they are cut up into thousands of parts. It doesn’t take five minutes to make. It’s a feature of my work; you need hundreds of one thing.”
Collage is his newest obsession, he says. “Collage came from proposals, years ago you’d be asked to draw things up, and if you’re clever you’d cut out a picture of a man and woman to show what size it is. They became epic,” he adds, laughing. “I’d put thousands of people into rows and then you’d get action. I’ve been in collage hell for 20 years now.”
Mach says that even the medium of postcards intrigues him. “Another thing about postcards is that they’re really, really cheap; cheap in all sorts of ways, not just the cost. It’s a cheap image or an easy image, a very quick image, of a place, or a time, or a theme. I could probably write a book about postcards. But it’s a valuable thing in contemporary culture. Even with computers and technology, people are still buying them.” And, for his first show in Hong Kong, one imagines people will be buying up his re-interpretations of the common postcard pretty damn quickly.
Clare Morin