cucurrucucu: Waste Not

EVENT DESCRIPTION

RNH Space is pleased to announce Waste Not, a solo presentation by cucurrucucu, featuring her photo collages that eerily confuse realities. cucurrucucu unbosoms herself as she wanders between conflicting understandings of her own reality whilst sneakily steps into viewers’ discomfort zone.

As an artist who only produces artworks off duty, cucurrucucu has found herself divided into different personae, as her subconsciousness often challenges the interests of her consciousness: she likes rules, but can be often distracted by disobedient thoughts; she is loyal to rationality and truth , but cannot just let go of stranger things.

In Waste Not, every collage work comes after she unleashes her subconsciousness. Collaging is also a desert island where she can land when drifting between these two states of mind. By juxtaposing a farmer and a commercial, a masterpiece of painting and a flip phone, the scenes of an earthquake rescue and factory pollution, and so forth, these artworks carry an undercurrent of humour with complexity.

The images used in cucurrucucu’s works were cut out from vintage magazines mostly published in the last century, collected in batches from second-hand stores during her stay in San Francisco. A reflection of the artist’s personal memories and fantasies, these appropriated images are repurposed as the artist upsets their original orders and logics, breaking down the realities they once represented and extending to novel imageries. In the exhibition, the works are also framed with various findings from Hong Kong’s thrift shops. This decision not only inspired the exhibition’s Chinese title which contains the Cantonese slang term literally for thrift shops, but also initiates a conversation that surpasses time and space.

Waste Not is the first chapter of the series Reality Overdose, which gathers three image-based exhibitions, demonstrating individual experiences of how our self-awareness and understanding of life are confined by the realities which we are born into, and how we can use such realities as vessels for authentic self-expression.

Reality Overdose, curated by Yang Jiang, is part of Satellite Exhibitions by Hong Kong International Photo Festival 2021.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

cucurrucucu is a millennial nomad who makes art out of used and discarded materials. She graduated from San Francisco Art Institute, and currently lives and works in Hong Kong. She functions differently in daytime, and only appears after dark to make art.