‘Gross’: Hong Kong exhibition of human-beast sculptures from Australian artist Patricia Piccinini evokes disgust and emotion
- ‘Hope’, Patricia Piccinini’s first Hong Kong solo show, includes grotesque but cute transgenic works designed to be at once repulsive and endearing
- The artist intends many of her ambiguous works to cause reflection on how we as humans use animals to benefit our lives, and the responsibility we have to them
At first glance, Patricia Piccinini’s hyperrealistic sculptures come across as creepy, unsettling and even repulsive. But look intently, and you will soon find yourself won over by the palpable tenderness of these anthropomorphic creatures.
“Hope”, at Tai Kwun, is Piccinini’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The artist, who represented Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, is showing over 50 works, including her signature lifelike sculptures and a range of video works, paintings and drawings.
The artist, who has come to Hong Kong to install the exhibition, says she has been thinking about technology and the body since she was a young child, when she watched her mother suffer through years of liver cancer.
“I was really interested in medical innovation as I wanted her to be saved by medicine. In the end, she wasn’t, but I would have liked that to happen,” Piccinini says.
“Almost 40 years ago, if somebody had said to us, ‘Oh, we can save your mum, we can give her a new liver, but it has to come from this pig,’ we’d be going, ‘Great!’ We wouldn’t care if it was unnatural, if it was artificial – we just wanted her to live.”