Tadpole to Frog King

Ming Fay   2011

From: Link

 

Frog King and friends at his studio in Cattle Depot

 

Last summer, I visited Kwok Mang-ho’s studio-- also known as the “Frog king Kwok Museum”-- at the Cattle Depot Artist Village in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The studio “crystallises” Kwok’s work, his life, and his personality into a single space. It is both a stage and an archive that forms a singular body of work. I use the word “crystallises”, because the Frog King created it himself, drop-by-drop and layer-by-layer. The cavernous space is the largest of Kwok’s studios that I have seen. The glue of his art has become increasingly cohesive over the past four decades, due to his non-stop creativity and the power of his brand of performance-based body art, installation and video. Kwok’s boundless energy and his personal approach to projects come naturally, and the spontaneous reactions they provoke are the key to his vitality.

 

A tadpole in a time of multiple changes

 

When Frog King came across the calendar ladies

 

Kwok grew up in Hong Kong during the late 1960s, a time of unknown possibilities and continuous changes. The British Crown Colony’s next-door neighbour, China, was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. The Vietnam War was escalating. US battleships berthed in the harbour for a spot of rest and relaxation. Cantonese opera, local kung fu movies, mainland propaganda messages, pop melodies and rock’n’roll blared out simultaneously from the new Japanese transistor radios in the streets. Hordes of foreign tourists, businessmen, correspondents and sailors mingled with the locals. Chinese people wearing the latest western suits and ladies in cheongsams sat alongside new high-rise buildings adorned with multilingual neon signs, while new media poured in from all over the world. A young person wishing to focus on art was puzzled by the choices available to “Now Artists”. It was a time of cultural fusion and confusion on all levels-- chop seuy culture a la carte. The word “new” is always exciting, and sometimes it comes with flashes and neon lights. There was the New Ink painting movement to the east of the city (in Japan, Taiwan and Korea) and abstract art to the West. Hong Kong’s young generation was committed to the “now”, and it embraced everything in a mix-and-match manner.

 

Rebel with a cause

 

Frog King Selected to take part in the 54th Venice Biennale

 

Kwok was formally taught by renowned modern Chinese painters, including Grand Master Lui Shou-kwan, yet his passion for self-expression took him beyond the ink painting tradition. His artistic development formed an expanding spiral with ink at its hub. Everything he caught in his net became his branded catch-- and it still is today. This confused his conservative audience, and many cast a suspicious eye on his work, questioning what it was and whether it was art.

 

Kwok’s revolution began with him burning paintings and sculpture, as well as with performances focused on ink, such as dipping fish in ink and then letting them “swim” on rice paper, or filling his mouth with ink and spraying it onto various surfaces. Here was a young artist who really craved for and played out a new style in Hong Kong art. Kwok was an innovator of an avant-garde art movement that no one dared to follow at a time when Hong Kong’s boundaries were defined by ancient tradition with a new edge. Kwok became an outcast rebel.

 

Frog King, the Great Wall of China, 1979

 

Much of his work is characterised by his background and interest in ink and calligraphy, and a playful, mischievous manner. Plastic bags were the primary materials in his early mixed-media performances. He would inflate them with his breath or wave them in the air, inflating and stringing them in chains in a spontaneous installation, such as the one entitled “Plastic Bag Happenings in China” at the Great Wall outside Beijing in 1979. He was the wild child of his time, and other artists felt distanced from his art. He went alone on his own journey to discover self-expression and alchemy through fire and water, happenings and performances, plastic bags and garbage, ink-painting collages and one-hour photos all in one. His works are a perpetual cycle achieved by his energy and a collision of different forms, styles and materials. Kowk’s assemblages of objects are a direct manifestation of his artistic background-- that of the Hong Kong cultural consumer collective psyche. It is a society rooted by the objects it creates, consumes and discards.

 

Froggy days

 

Frog King in New York

 

Kwok arrived in New York as a student during the early 1980s. He found the city’s cultural mix more complex and exciting than Hong Kong’s. In the beginning, he designed his own wearable art, such as political buttons and fashion jewellery, and he showed his plastic bags and found object installations at venues ranging from galleries and discotheques to the streets of New York City. He simultaneously continued his multiple art forms, as in Hong Kong, while absorbing the energy and pace of New York and its players. Soon, he adopted the frog as his personal icon, a logo in the shape of two triangular eyes riding on a half moon boat shape, symbolising the eastern eye and western eye on a cross-cultural bridge or sailing boat. He still uses this symbol today, and it has developed into many manifestations, including the Froggy Glasses that his friends and acquaintances have been photographed wearing, and an ongoing stream of socially interactive Froggy experiences. For Kwok, New York was an ideal subject for his fascination with cultural exchange and the complexities of language. He has now been playing the role of artist/translator/performer with his Froggy symbol for three decades.

 

In the Chinese painting tradition, master painters and calligraphers perform and demonstrate their skills in front of an audience. Drawing on these traditional roots, Kwok has invented his own style of live demonstrations by blending the traditional elements of street art, acrobatics, magic and performances. In New York City’s streets and museums, he wrote English names in Chinese characters with ink for audiences, and he practiced graffiti by painting his Froggy symbols and other forms.

 

From Froggy to Frog King

 

Frog King at the 54th Venice Biennale

 

Almost 15 years after returning to Hong Kong from New York in 1996, Kwok Mang-ho has emerged as one of the most vital, restless and influential avant-garde artists. The Frog King of Hong Kong is hard to classify. Chaotic and compelling-- an outgrowth of urban living, crowd aesthetics, dangling consumer desires, and living for the moment-- Kwok’s work is a form of transformation and alchemy that remains true to his words: “Art is life and life is art”.

 

At the end of my studio visit, I asked Kwok what he would show in Venice, if he were selected. He told me he would pack up his entire studio and ship it there. The Frog King of Hong Kong has arrived. Bravo! 

 

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Ming Fay was born in Shanghai, raised in Hong Kong, and is based in New York City.

 

He is a sculptor and has an extensive exhibition history in North America and Asia as well as creating numerous public art projects in the United States. He taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1968-1969 and also at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 1975. He currently teaches sculpture at William Paterson University in New Jersey, USA.

 

www.mingfay.com