The only way of knowing that we were headed in the right direction was by following the handful of edgy, arty looking people who you might not normally find at the ferry pier in Hong Kong, undeterred by the relentless and blinding rain which had people scurrying in all directions, narrowly missing one another, umbrellas held out like shields.
Walking up the open air staircase to Central Pier 4, the rain attempting to wash away all in its path, the atmosphere began to look more and more like what we were after – an exhibition by a street artist.
Debris, the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong by Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, AKA Vhils, is a multi-site initiative including an intervention on one of the city’s iconic trams and an exhibition at Pier 4, “encouraging visitors to explore the city and reflect on the nature of the urban environment through the lens of the artist”, according to the HOCA (Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation) website, the non-profit organisation behind his show in Hong Kong.
Coinciding with this year’s Art Basel, HOCA chose iconic sites across the city for the exhibition, including a moving tram and the ferry pier, showcasing Vhils’ craft with a variety of techniques using drilling, billboard collages, neon light boxes and sculpture to deconstruct and rearrange components.
The Bladerunner-like atmosphere of the opening night (think sheets of raging rain, neon lights and shiney black surfaces) added to the effect. Featuring ten different rooms, each with a very different feel, guests scurried between spaces, taking in the artworks, and avoiding the determined raindrops that peppered the open gaps on the rooftop exhibition.
A tunnel with moving images of daily Hong Kong scenes filmed in slow motion served as the backbone to the show, the familiar local images envoking the city’s famous escalator pace.
The artwork on display in the rooms employed a whole array of media and effects, from flashy neons to the more sober deconstructed billboard posters, etched away to reveal faces that look both familiar and foreign in equal measure.
Looking at something you have seen a thousand times – the layers of posters on city walls – this time something is staring back at you from under the paper millefeuille.
Chances are these faces are more unknown than known. The artist chooses to celebrate the average person on the street, rather than the faces we are exposed to through the media, day in and day out.
Speaking to Macau CLOSER in August last year, the young Portuguese artist explained his thinking behind the faces that emerge when he digs away at the stuff that surrounds us.
“My work explores the question of identity a lot, hence the use of portraits. On the one hand, the intention of giving faces to the walls is a symbolic act of restoring a human dimension that has been lost in cities, especially in those dying spaces, devoid of character,” says Vhils.
“On the other hand, it is also a gesture of appreciation for the average individual in opposition to the visual saturation based on the cult of celebrity, so fashionable nowadays in advertising and media.
“Generally speaking, the people depicted are anonymous public citizens whom I have crossed paths with in several locations. Some have a specific connection with where they are depicted, but others are transported to other places to enable the comprehensive, broad nature of reflection.”
In recognition of his talent, Vhils has received one of the highest decorations in Portugal, the Commendation of the Order of Infante D. Henrique. He has also created a music video for U2 and appeared on the list of Forbes’ “30 under 30” as one of the most successful young artists.
“When I started doing graffiti I didn’t have any artistic aspirations. In a way, it was graffiti that awakened my interest in visual arts. At the time, I was very young. I did not think about things objectively. For me graffiti was pure rebellion, vandalism, a way to spend time with friends who had a creative side. But it also had another element, one of risk, urban exploration,” Vhils notes.
“As I grew older, I began to think seriously about what I wanted to do in public spaces and developed work that sought to interact with people and the environment. What I do today is not graffiti, but I see graffiti as my training: it taught me to deal with complex realities, to read urban space in a comprehensive and thorough way, working with certain surfaces, materials and tools. Much of my work has absorbed these concepts and techniques and makes use of them in other contexts,” he adds.
HOCA decribes Vhils’ art in a global context: ‘Over the past decade, Vhils has been developing a unique visual reflection on present-day urban societies across the globe and the people who form them. Renowned for his groundbreaking carving technique, which employs the built environment as his canvas, Vhils’ approach has been hailed as one of the most compelling to have emerged from the contemporary urban art scene.’
Based between London and Lisbon, the artist has been expanding the scope of his projects to Asia in recent years. In November last year, he completed his first outdoor work in Hong Kong on the wall of The Mills, a newly launched contemporary art hub in Tsuen Wan housed in the former Nan Fung Textiles Building. Depicting a female factory worker who used to work in the facility, the piece was carved entirely with a hammer drill.
Following multiple interventions across Hong Kong, Debris is one of the most encompassing and holistic presentations of Vhils’ artistic production. Presenting artworks in new mediums for the first time, central to the new series is the exploration of his practice of destructive creation in an environment characterised by the plurality of media, according to HOCA. An avid experimentalist, the artist has been developing compositions made of neon and metal, enabling him to expand the boundaries of visual expression.
Speaking about his first show in Hong Kong to art site BLOUIN ARTINFO, Vhils talked about the city and the influence it had on his work.
“I think Hong Kong is distinctive for many things – from its walls and their layers of content, to its cultural and architectural heritage. And above all, its extreme urbanization and density makes you think of a window into the future. Its neon signs are also a distinctive feature that has inspired me for this exhibition.”
“I always work with the materials that a city produces, as well as its waste: from advertising posters removed from the streets, to other discarded objects I use as media. In the case of Hong Kong, a new body of work based on neons represents the next stage in my practice in line with my explorations of the role of advertising in the city context. Glimpses of neons that you can see in Hong Kong and glimpses of reflections and imaginary neons come together in a huge composition that forms one piece.”
The viewer is invited to dive in deep, using all their senses, on a journey of reflection.
“The whole idea is to create an immersive experience for the viewer that engages all the senses and involves people in a reflection on the urban landscape of Hong Kong. It explores how extreme urbanization and the saturation provided by visual information present in its public space affects us in the way we are, our dreams, our expectations in life, and how we have to give up certain things in the name of progress and comfort,” the artist explains.
A philosophy that suspends judgement, rather than trying to find a point of human reference underlies the approach that sees the artist travel around the world, producing work in a diverse set of societies.
“Tying in with the larger reflection I’ve been developing with my work, it also explores how the global model of development is creating a world where people from different cultures can better understand each other, but at the same time is making everything increasingly uniform and effacing what made us different and unique. Exploring this ambivalence between the positive and negative aspects of globalization has been constant in most of my work.”
Standing in front of the face of a Chinese man, emerging from layers of posters, softly lit on that wet and dark opening night, his expression is serene and overrides all the messages those posters were originally designed to sell/tell us. He looks at peace, like the element of positivity may be victorious in this globalization battle. Even if just for a moment.
