While putting the final touches to his installation inside the Hong Kong Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale, Kwok Mang-ho looks like the most unassuming and humble person on earth.
Yet, after wearing his transnational shaman-like costume, Kwok disappears, morphing into Frog King, a performance artist aiming at revolutionising the world through his picturesquely ordered chaos of colours and objects.
Born in China in 1947, Kwok grew up in Hong Kong where he studied Fine Arts.
In his career he assumed multiple identities and, as a rebel artist he first experimented with avant-garde perfomances focused on ink and then on plastic bags, creating on the Great Wall and in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square unique performance pieces.
In 1996, after living for 15 years in New York (where he also created wearable art and fashion jewellery) and absorbing its multiculturalism, Kwok went back to Hong Kong.
Here he turned into the avant-garde artist Frog King and produced a number of different works, including paintings, pieces inspired by ink art and calligraphy, sculptures, installations and performances.
The Hong Kong Pavilion at the Venice Biennale entitled “Frogtopia - Hongkornucopia” celebrates Frog King’s utopian world at its best.
The Pavilion is divided in four main sections, “9 Million+”, “Frog’s Nest”, “Yum-Dimension Installation” and “Frog-Fun-Lum Piazza”, all featuring mixed-media works of art.
Kwok recreated inside the Pavilion his studio, coming up with a high-density living environment crammed with discarded objects, photographs, gigantic frog origami, straw hats and Frog King bags, in a nutshell a forest of bizarre materials, perfectly reflecting Hong Kong’s contradictions but also our consumer society.
In the next room videos showcase images from Frog King’s Froggy Sunglasses Project aimed at recording his audience’s complicity at playing his game of identity switch by donning his colourful sunglasses and immersing themselves into the role of the creative artist.
The Pavilion is in constant transformation as people are invited to join in as it happened during the opening days when Benny Chia, the Pavilion Chief Curator and founder of Hong Kong Fringe Club, the Pavilion commissioner, journalists, visitors, locals and kids were dragged by Frog King into a multi-cultural performance in celebration of art’s participatory nature.
What is Frogtopia?
Frog King: Frog King likes to play. In 1970 he turned life into art which means that he turned into a living art piece and, after spending a period of time in New York – from 1980 to 1995 – he gained a lot of energy and experience that has now turned into “Frogtopia”, a cross-cultural bridge that joins the East and the West, culture, froggy eyes and communication!
Why did you conceive the Pavilion as a space in constant transformation?
Frog King: The Frog King is a scientist, he likes studying and putting things together in the “Yum Dimension” and reuniting everything into a multi-layered situation that doesn’t have any order apart from the Frog King order and that combines everything in the universe, left and right, yin and yang, front and back.
What is the main aim of the Froggy Sunglasses Project?
Frog King: One of the main principles behind the Frog King’s order is playing with everybody, turning them into frogs by asking them to wear “froggy sunglasses”. When they accept to wear the sunglasses, they create One Second Performances. The project has been going on for ten years now all over the world and everybody who hasn’t worn yet the sunglasses can still participate.
In which ways has your work changed throughout the years?
Frog King: In the ‘70s I was doing set design for the Cantonese opera. I worked on very extreme experiments with traditional roots and the opera actors were very disturbed by my work. The Frog King’s current projects are instead about searching for a new direction and level of life that reunites calligraphy, sculpture, installation and performance arts that involve ordinary people.
The theme of this year’s Biennale is “Illuminations”, will you be enlightening the visitors with your big froggy eyes?
Frog King: As I said ordinary people end up turning through my performances into my main art material and as a consequence into a piece of my art. Sometimes people forget they are an art form, so the main purpose of Frog King’s art at the Biennale will be waking them up and bringing them back to nature, act like a dinosaur genie and bring them back to a primitive time.
Your attire has got some strong connections with traditional and tribal costumes, what inspired it?
Frog King: I lived in New York for 15 years in a multi-cultural environment and I absorbed other tribes and cultures, turning them into the main ingredients to create the fusion Frog King.
Does the Frog King belong only to the Hong Kong art scene or is he transnational?
Frog King: Hong Kong is a very busy and very commercial city and while the Frog King is happy to be living there, he is also happy to go to other places, blend in and help people chasing spiritual energy through art.
Thank you for your time!
Frog King: You’re very welcome! But now let’s get some action and take a picture of yourself wearing the froggy sunglasses…
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