Buy a hot dog and become an artwork at Austrian artist’s interactive art project at K11 Musea in Hong Kong
- A bright yellow distorted Volkswagen, built by artist Erwin Wurm, will be selling hot dogs in Tsim Sha Tsui for a month
- Wurm talks about his works, influencing the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and how skinny he is
In 2012, Hong Kong’s transport fans mourned the passing of its old, non air-conditioned double-deckers, popularly known as “hot dog” buses. This week, however, a hot dog bus has appeared in front of Tsim Sha Tsui’s K11 Musea. +
It’s bright yellow, it’s a Volkswagen and it has one class of fare: hot dogs.
It’s an artwork by the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm. Last summer, Hot Dog Bus spent its weekends feeding the 50,000 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It will now do the same for Hongkongers.
Wurm, 65, a slender, handsome man, shivers in K11’s air conditioning. Twice within half an hour he refers, unprompted, to his size. “I was always slim,” he says at one point; and later (of the need for assistants’ help to create large works in his 12th-century Schloss outside Vienna), “I was always skinny and not very muscular”.
His shape is relevant because Hot Dog Bus is part of Wurm’s ongoing fascination with distortion. Volkswagen began manufacturing the Microbus in the 1950s; with the help of polystyrene and putty, Wurm’s version has grotesque late-middle-aged spread. The hot dogs it serves are intended to add similar layers to humans. It’s an interactive performance: you, bloating as you gorge on calories, also become a sculpture.