In the archive of the Victoria & Albert Museum there is a tin-glazed earthenware figure dating back to the late 17th century, portraying a man's head connected to his legs, with his arms emerging from his breeches. This figure is associated with the frontispiece illustration of the 1606 play "No-body and Some-body," depicting a man without a torso (View this photo). The character gained popularity when the play came out, prompting potters in London to craft ceramic figurines depicting him. His popularity led to the Dehua kilns in China producing and exporting similar figurines.
The blue and manganese-purple figure from the V&A archives served as the primary inspiration for the multi-colored fiberglass sculpture titled "The Dream of Mr. Somebody" (2024) by Gary Card.
Installed in the Oi! Lawn, outside the Oil Street Art Space (Oi!) in Hong Kong's historic yacht club clubhouse (established in 1908), the sculpture serves as a welcoming piece for Card's inaugural large-scale solo exhibition in the city - "People Mountain People Sea" (running until July 28th).
Over the past two decades, the British artist, set designer, and illustrator has collaborated with numerous designers, companies, fashion houses and stores, including Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Uniqlo, Vivienne Westwood, Comme des Garçons, Dover Street Market, LN-CC, and Tim Walker.
His work has graced the pages of prestigious publications, from The New York Times to Vogue and Dazed & Confused. While Card continues his commercial collaborations, in the last few years he has also been focusing more on his own artistic endeavors.
The exhibition's title in Hong Kong alludes to a Chinglish idiom indicating that a place is very crowded, a definition reflected in the sensory overload experienced within the exhibition, exemplified by "Mr. Somebody."
According to Card, the figure of Mr. Somebody, adorned with an assortment of objects and towering over a mountain constructed from various items commonly found in Hong Kong, symbolizes the hyper-connected global network in which individuals engage through the consumption of products and information.
In many respects, the objects surrounding Mr. Somebody serve as a reflection of Card's own fascination with material possessions (as a teenager, he was drawn to comics, cartoons, and the thrill of discovering treasures in second-hand shops, from antiques to Chinese vases and vintage kimonos).
Mr. Somebody acts as a conduit to modernity, introducing visitors to other artworks characterized by a sense of kaleidoscopic overstimulation and confusion, emblematic of contemporary life.
Within the exhibition venue, visitors encounter densely populated scenes; while some artists layer fabrics to create monumental designs, Card employs a diverse range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, illustration, graphic design, and set design to create his universe.
One of the spaces within the venue is transformed into an immersive visual and sensory experience, a pavilion enveloped in mirrors and digital screens, inundating visitors with digital animations. In this space, stripped of references to consumption, the sculptures take on new life and form, while contributing to the creation of a disorienting atmosphere for visitors.
The fusion of Eastern and Western influences resonates within Hong Kong's cultural landscape, but also within Gary Card's artworks.
His series of "encrusted" sculptures and paintings blend indeed Western and Eastern inspirations, modern and ancient motifs, and familiar and unfamiliar objects. Drawing from his cultural background and his interpretation of Hong Kong's diverse landscape, Card incorporates elements recognizable to locals, often presenting them in novel ways. For instance, his artworks may echo locations Card saw while travelling in Hong Kong, such as Wah Fu Celestial Hole, an unofficial shrine where broken statues of gods and goddesses are collected, but their Pop Art colors re-contextualise the sculptures.
Several fiberglass sculptures, including "Little Charm Boy" and "The Merchant and His Camel", are based on archival pieces like a 19th-century snuff bottle featuring a boy holding a gourd vase, and a Tang dynasty figurine portraying a camel.
Yet the snuff bottle base has been replaced with an array of assorted, outdated technology and ambiguous shapes, while the central character, the boy, has been transformed into a guardian-like figure protecting his purposeless hoard.
Symbols of the Silk Road trade route, Bactrian camels used to transport goods out of China across the western regions into Central Asia and beyond, and Card hints at this cultural exchange between East and West incorporating random objects in his camel, at times in a surrealist key (check out the upside-down moustache for the eyebrows).
Card's sentimentality for inanimate objects is evident throughout his works, emphasizing the value we place on possessions. Many items featured in his sculptures are sourced from photographs taken during his visit to Hong Kong in 2023, as well as from past magazine editorials, advertisements, kitsch souvenirs, and Internet graphics.
The multimedia paintings "Journey to the Unknown" and "Laughing Cloud Head" are for example inspired by the Yuzi (pomelo citrus fruit) wrapped in plastic film with red ribbons and decorated with auspicious stickers, gifts commonly exchanged during the Lunar New Year. These ordinary objects are re-contextualized and blown up, rendered in unfamiliar proportions and incorporating visual fragments drawn from Card's trips to Hong Kong over the years.
Through his pieces, Card encourages to re-discover the familiar (and at times the banal) with fresh eyes, echoing British pop artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi's fascination with the ability of the artist "to achieve a metamorphosis of quite ordinary things into something wonderful and extraordinary."
The more colorful pieces in the exhibition clash with the ones in the Research Room that contains past works and maquettes that served as inspiration to develop the "People Mountain People Sea" exhibition.
Here, visitors will also spot selections from his evocative "Homunculus" series (2020) created during the Covid-19 pandemic and amidst the solitude of the UK lockdown, while the initial 3D printed prototypes of the sculptures on display offer a glimpse into the artist's creative process.
In reflecting on his sculptures Card muses on the dichotomies between commercial and sacred, cartoonish and realistic, Eastern and Western influences. He explores the concept of "barnacles of time," suggesting that each iteration of his characters accumulates layers of meaning and experiences, evolving into something new while retaining traces of their original form.
While this is an interesting concept that may also prove inspiring for fashion designers, there is a final and more personal dichotomy at the bottom of Card's exhibition, also connected with fashion: the artist seems divided between his fascination with surplus of objects and his commercial work for fashion houses and brands, and his art, that stems from the language of consumption, but that is leading him towards a form of pop collage characterised by dazzling colors.
While his Hong Kong exhibition gravitates towards the realm of art, his recent work for the multibrand concept store LN-CC in Hackney, London, and the launch of his latest toy ("Sad Sack") developed with Unbox Industries and available from toy company Amaz by Lokianno, still anchor Card in commerce. It seems that, at least for the time being, he will exist in this intermediary space where he is still surrounded by his cherished objects, but where he is still able to detach from them and ponder about the culture of materialism, consumerism and consumption.
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