Dan Perjovschi: Hong Kong First

Para/Site Art Space - Hong Kong

Curated by Alvaro Rodríguez-Fominaya

By Robin Peckham

Para/Site, the only longstanding alternative space on Hong Kong Island, has demonstrated an erratic relationship with the notion of the parachute exhibition: lacking the space and resources to launch major researched retrospectives and surveys, the program often resorts to inviting international artists to produce new work, often site-specific, for the storefront gallery in the traditional but gentrifying neighborhood of Sheung Wan. Dan Perjovschi, the Bucharest-based artist who has shed new light on contemporary possibilities for the medium of the political cartoon with his humorously critical wall drawings, fits into this mold with his solo project Hong Kong First, for which he traveled to the city and filled the walls of the space within the short span of just over a week.

In this case, fortunately, the results are impressive. Perjovschi has covered all seven wall faces in the space with his trademark line drawings in black marker, using the vernacular architecture features of the building to great effect by working around and across protruding concrete elements and seams while the ceiling plays host to what must be hundreds of headlines cut out from the pages of several English-language daily newspapers taped in neat rows like a cloud of tags in various sizes. The drawings serve to position the place of Hong Kong within the nexus of economic and political forces-neoliberal corporate globalization, broadly speaking-that the artist has taken as his motivating force: some portions refer to isolated anecdotes from his personal observations and explorations of the city, while others refer to more general political gestures linked to the actions and events of global current events as outlined on the ceiling.

Dan Perjovschi, Hong Kong First (detail), 2011. Courtesy of Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong.

Eschewing the notion of site-specificity as a practice requiring in-depth research and understanding of the immediate cultural environs of the venue in question, Perjovschi prefers simply to show up. Traveling with the eyes of a virgin tourist-albeit an intensely critical one with a very specific art world perspective-allows the artist to provide for unexpected value judgments in terms of urban culture and flows of capital, as with the simple set of phrases he has scrawled on the leaflet accompanying the exhibition: “Communism is bad. Capitalism is bad. China is good.” There is clearly a virile sense of humor here, a compulsion to laugh that functions as a weapon in the face of power, but the surgical precision with which Perjovschi needles both the larger global environment and the individual viewer owes more to a surprising understanding of the specificity of his audience built on the fundamental criticality presupposed by the globetrotting artist remaining outside the systems of commercial circulation. A sketch in one particularly revealing vignette, for example, contrasts the situation of 1989 (a lone man standing down a line of tanks) with that of the present moment (a lone tank blocked by a crowd bearing shopping bags and carts), a wry take on the relationship between consumerism and politics.

Revealed to the public the week of the 25 January movement in Egypt, however, this otherwise benign imagery takes on new meaning; the humor may be cynical, but the politics are ultimately optimistic.

(January 29 - April 17, 2011)

Robin Peckham is a writer and curator based in Hong Kong. He is affiliated to the Society for Experimental Cultural Production.

Filed Under: Reviews