Hong Kong, March 5 – April 2, 2016, http://www.yallaygallery.net/
A gallery specializing in Middle Eastern Art which seems to be a subsidiary of another Hong Kong Gallery, Rossi & Rossi. On show was an Iranian painter’s painted animation, some of the original frames from the animation, and also some larger paintings. The base of the work was a youtube video of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s royal wedding. Haerizadeh printed out all frames o A4 paper, painted them over, and photographed them to reassemble the hand-rotoscoped animation.
It was a slightly surreal sequence of free associations slightly reminiscent of telephone doodles or surrealist automatic drawing, but in color. The animation looked catchy thanks to the underlying mass media product: The edits and image compositions were attention economy media ready-mades, which greatly facilitated the consumption of the work even in the “artified” overpainted version. As a painter, Haerizadeh thus used a clever shortcut, that allowed him to make use of his painterly skills, while “outsourcing” (or “appropriating” as you like) the animation work which would probably look much worse if he had attempted it himself.
The result was decorative and watch-able, but it left the question open what the relationship between the source material and the result was. The gallery text follows the well-used storyline about a critical and mocking interpretation of the mediated event, but that did not convince me. It could be equally well interpreted as a homage to the BBC news team and their mastery of the art of live reporting and visual storytelling, on which the artist piggybacked.
Lastly, I also wondered how the Middle Eastern specialization of the gallery did fit into this. The work seemed to be global rather than regional, as seemed the artist with shows and works in collections across the globe. Is there any point in outlining Yallay as a regionally specialized gallery at all? Let’s remove all these ghetto borders.
