The World is your Oyster

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Ben Brown Fine Arts is pleased to present our forthcoming exhibition The World Is Your Oyster at the Hong Kong gallery. As part of the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association’s (HKAGA) Summer Programme, the exhibition is organised by Hong Kong-based curator Juliana Chan with the aim of highlighting local artistic talents and fostering the Hong Kong arts community. The exhibition features works by LAU Hong Lam, LO Lai Lai Natalie, Mindy LUI, Amy TONG and Gavin YIP. The artists, hailing from various disciplinary backgrounds, will be exhibiting together for the first time in this group exhibition.

The exhibition’s title, The World Is Your Oyster, is a congratulatory wish to these five Hong Kong artists at the dawn of their careers. Stripped of its metaphorical meaning, the famous idiom is borrowed to describe how the food we eat (the oyster) is a product and reflection of the complex modern food system (the world). The contrasting difference between an oyster and the whole world also alludes to the huge gap between our food consumption and its industrial production.

As we sit at the dining table today, the distance between our plates and the origins of our food is tremendous. Spatially, the food we eat often travels thousands of miles before it lands on the shelves of supermarkets; physiognomically it appears processed and packaged, reminding us very little of its creaturely origins. While the commodification of food intensifies, alienation becomes the defining character of the human-food relationship. Not only are we physically distant from the origins of what we eat, the abundance of luscious food imagery on social media and in advertising betrays our psychological disconnection with food. Roland Barthes described in Mythologies (1957) that the exaggerated photographs in culinary magazines were meant ‘for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense’. The phenomena which Barthes commented on is essentially what we today call ‘food pornography’ – a display of food so sensationally and artificially idealized that is detached from both reality and nature. It is a self-perpetuating cycle of desire and commodification that ultimately creates a disconnect between our natural world and the food industry.

It is against this conceptual background that The World Is Your Oyster calls on five Hong Kong artists to reflect on individual and collective relationships with food. Each artist employs a different strategy that propels us to examine what and how we eat. For instance, paintings of dogs engaging in playful mouthing and sound performance with bioacoustics by Gavin Yip speak to the relationship between the eater and the eaten. Amy Tong’s abstracted renditions of scenes from wedding banquets is an examination of the role of food in our traditions and, to certain extent, a commentary on the absurdity of such traditions. By way of classical composition and realistic depiction, Lau Hong Lam’s series of prints draw symbols and references from Greek mythology to examine the tension between desire and guilt around comfort food. In contrast, Mindy Lui and Lo Lai Lai Natalie turned their investigative lens to nature, human labour and farming. Lui’s pencil frottage meticulously reproduces the image of a single grain of rice repeatedly until it covers the entire surface of the drawing. Its repetitive and unostentatious aesthetic reminds us of the exhausting and monotonous life of a farmer. Equally concerned with agriculture, Lo Lai Lai Natalie’s film Cold Fire amalgamates footage of vegetables in fermentation with clips of a plane crash. They are two seemingly unrelated narratives, but when presented together they talk about the unpredictability of nature and life. Concurrent with the gallery exhibition, the artists will conduct public programs and workshops to help audiences form a deeper and more personal understanding of food-related topics.