João Vasco Paiva
When Portuguese artist João Vasco Paiva is done taking over a gallery space, his exhibitions turn heads. They’re challenging, visually appealing and totally open to interpretation, and his inclusion in this month’s Hong Kong Eye arts show signals that his career is on the verge of blowing up. He sat down with Sean Hebert to discuss his most recent installations, the reactions they’ve garnered and his advice for young artists.
HK Magazine: You have an exhibition in which a video of moving water is projected into a foggy room. Where did that idea come from?
João Vasco Paiva: Initially, I had this clichéd idea of a time when you could smoke in the cinema; that image of the video going through smoke. Everything starts from that. I shot waves generated by the wake of a boat—a ferry to Lamma, or whatever—and then ran it through an algorithm that creates a kind of 3D virtual environment. In another room, there are five small animations: very simple geometric shapes, but their movement exists because of what is happening in the video [in the room] beside them.
HK: How do people react?
JVP: Most people react as I expected—they turn their back to the projection and look at the projector, as if they are inside a club and seeing lines of fog moving. There is a very strong contrast from something very mathematical and clean [in the animations] to this foggy room.
HK: Do you craft what people should take from the installation, or do you create a world and let the audience experience it?
JVP: I am somehow manipulating their experience, but it would be a bit pretentious if I said I knew exactly how they would react. I don’t control that. I don’t want to. That would be a dead end for the work. It’s like the difference between very commercial Hollywood cinema where everything is controlled and your brain is taking a break; or the book which inspired that film, which gives you something but you have to make up the rest by yourself. With art, I prefer the latter. Things shouldn’t be too direct.
HK: Your most notable work reimagines the MTR, with text-less turnstiles and graphics which mock real-life signage. Why do it?
JVP: I don’t want to be too autobiographical, but I think that project had a lot to do with an awareness of my situation here in Hong Kong. I moved here seven years ago to do a Master’s degree where I spent two years learning computer programming language, and that was my excuse not to learn Cantonese. But I was very comfortable in my situation. Hong Kong is the kind of place where you can actually survive without knowing the local language, and that gave me some room to look at things from a different perspective. It’s somehow a very privileged position; I am not a tourist but I am not a local. I walk in the MTR and look at signs, and because I cannot read Chinese there is a just a blank space—just a form. So I started by erasing all the text to show this other kind of language.
