Turning the association of ‘dank memes’ with forms of toxic nationalism and patriarchal entitlement around, as a tool to engage with nonconformist artistic positions
The phrase ‘hellish gags’ emerged from the digital Sinosphere to describe what the Western world knows as dank memes: image-text compositions that enact shorthand commentaries ranging from morally ambiguous political critique to outright racist and ableist discrimination. Rather than being about hellish gags themselves, however, this group exhibition seems to be a presentation of art by the gagged – the subjects who normally endure the brunt of the dark, politically incorrect humour associated with the term lending this exhibition its title. With that in mind, Hellish Gags seems to turn the dank meme’s association with forms of toxic nationalism and patriarchal entitlement around, as a tool to engage with nonconformist artistic positions.
Take Jason Pulgarin’s The artist opening up (2022), a brightly coloured, caricaturelike self-portrait that mimics the aesthetics of Windows’s Paint tool (here using flashe vinyl paint on canvas). The top of Pulgarin’s head, plus his hands and a single Timberland-booted foot, are the only parts of him visible from behind the painting he’s holding, which itself depicts the artist’s torso as an anatomy model, through which a long sword pushes down from his mouth, as if his torso were a kebab. The painting is part of a series in which Pulgarin shields his painted face with different objects: in one example not shown here, Pa’Lante (2022), with a book titled LATINXART. With that in mind, Pulgarin’s skewered flesh could well be critiquing the often reductive, identity-based consumption to which artists like him, an American of Puerto Rican and Colombian descent, are routinely expected to submit in the context of the commercial artworld. Nearby, Elliott Jamal Robbins’s hand-drawn animation The John Wayne Code (2023) resists another form of systemic identitarianism, here embodied by the figure of John Wayne, mid-twentieth-century Hollywood’s paradigmatic cowboy and an icon of the American rightwing. Named after a book compiling quotes by and images of Wayne that celebrates his conservatism, Robbins vandalises the turning pages of that book in the video. Expressive black-and-white-paint interventions include rendering suited white men naked and introducing a naked Black man who strangles director John Ford with his penis.
Pulgarin’s and Robbins’s works are shown in a curtained-off space alongside four graphite- and-colour-pencil drawings on paper from circa 1990 by the Japanese artist Namio Harukawa. Evincing a smooth, leaden style recalling the work of Tom of Finland, each picture shows a modern, curvaceous woman – think chrome Venus of Willendorf crossed with Bettie Page and Tura Satana – being rimmed by a scrawny man, as she either sits on his face or lies on a bed. In each setting the man is bound, either with a red leash or by chains and rope, as with two scenes showing a woman sitting in a bar and a café respectively, on each occasion smiling, with a drink in hand. The extreme reversal of patriarchal power dynamics expressed by these femdom fantasies, in fact the creation of a male fetish artist, are contextualised by the artist’s pseudonym. Namio is an anagram of Naomi, the title character of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel about a Japanese man’s attempt at grooming a Eurasian waitress, which results in his complete submission to her; while Harukawa refers to actress Masumi Harukawa, who portrayed a violated woman fighting the patriarchy in Shōhei Imamura’s 1964 movie Intentions of Murder.
Protest and subversion as visual allegory feed this exhibition’s exploration of the hellish gag as a compositional strategy, in which visual storytelling straddles plausible deniability, innuendo and legibility. That multilayered functionality, in which a meme operates as both reflection and smokescreen, is made literal by Clara Wong’s Flash On (2021). The acrylic painting of an orange figure with 19 fingers (and one thumb), each touching a corresponding eye on its face, is installed behind a half-swung-open window covered in one-way-mirror film that both conceals and reflects the painted figure. Nearby, Wong’s Thyme Canvas Cake (Whole) (2023) enacts another overlap in the form of a cake made from canvas covered in white acrylic icing. The idea of the hellish gag as a visual metaphor feeds into Xiaoshi Qin’s Piano (2011), a short video of a hand placing various objects, from an orange to a bottle of Downy fabric softener, on a piano’s keyboard. While the exhibition text considers Piano in the context of labour, the image of a hand directing an assembly could equally apply to other forms of top-down organisation in Hong Kong and elsewhere, from the institutional to the political. That ability to reflect and refract a point is what makes a hellish gag both facile and effective, which is something this show embraces. It’s all a bit of fun until it isn’t, as demonstrated by the recent backlash across Chinese social media against artist Yue Minjun’s iconic – and indeed memetic – cynical realist laughing figures. To stay within the bounds of the former is often a matter of survival.
Hellish Gags at Square Street Gallery, Hong Kong, 27 April – 3 June
