Bringing together new and recent artworks by Kata Legrady (born in Barcs, Hungary; lives and works in Hanover, Budapest and Paris) and Wang Luyan (born, lives and works in Beijing), Doublethink playfully exposes the paradoxes of a world defined by unchecked consumption and an ongoing cycle of vengeance and violence. This exhibition is also held at Hong Kong Arts Centre, at the same time with different exhibits. Having come of age immersed in the powerful propaganda of Communist Hungary and China’s Cultural Revolution, respectively, Legrady and Wang share an aptitude for manipulating iconic forms and an abiding distrust for overreaching ideologies. Taken from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the exhibition’s title describes a mental maneuver in which contradictions are neutralized through self- deception and willed forgetting.
With her large-scale photographs of flower-encrusted bullets and candy-coated landmines, Kata Legrady links terms usually considered antagonistic: beauty and brutality, childhood games and warfare, conspicuous consumption and mass destruction are just three of the uneasily aligned dyads that emerge through her striking juxtapositions. Pairing the allure of luxury with the tragedy of mass casualties, Legrady coats what appears to be a bomb—its shape echoing “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb American forces dropped on Hiroshima in 1945—in a glossy pink lacquer inspired by a designer lipstick shade to create Chanel 217 (pink bomb), 2011. In Wang’s paintings, sculptures and installations, warfare never brings the promised stability because there are no victors: every action simultaneously triggers its opposite. Reminiscent of Picabia’s machinist works, Wang’s exacting paintings of wristwatches, such W Global Watch (2011), reflect the inseparability of national forces caught in the checkmate of posturing and reciprocal aggression. Such works demonstrate what Wang calls “gear logic”—interlocking power relations in which the geopolitical maneuvers of one country necessitates the repositioning of all others.
Neither artist condones violence, celebrates guns or seeks to minimize the consequences of living in world made dangerous by the technologies of war. Instead, both Legrady and Wang transform weapons into artistic material in order to reveal the doublethink that perpetuates the bloodshed around us. No good can ever come of Wang’s oversized W Fire at Both Ends Automatic Handgun D13–02 (2013); like all of the firearms in Wang’s works, it has been redesigned to shoot in both directions when the trigger is pulled, assuring mutual destruction. Legrady’s Government Balancoir “Pink Dollar” (2012) is an enormous handgun emblazoned with a US dollar bill and outfitted with a custom-made Hermès saddle, invites us to ride our consumer obsessions toward a fatal end. Doublethink marks the first time that Legrady and Wang are presenting their work to Hong Kong audiences.
Image: © Kata Legrady, Pekin Fine Arts
For more information about the concurrent exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, please click here.
