FEAST Projects is delighted to announce Sweet & Sour by Fensterbank, important works by the artist.

“Deliberately iconoclastic, passionately irreverent and wilfully provocative is how I am and how I will strive to be until my last breath.” - Fensterbank

FENSTERBANK (b.1953) attended the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris and is completely fluent in Chinese. In 1977 after graduating he traveled to China on a scholarship, from 1979 till 2007 he worked in China and Hong Kong in the Foreign Service. Fensterbank works with photomontage - his work is passionately committed to critiquing the political, social and economic issues in China. His trademark is irreverence, the only rules respected are aesthetic harmony and subversive provocation. His images are the result of a well-integrated combination of ideological and aesthetic choices, which unmask the structures that make power function, not through its transcendent ideology, but due to specific historical circumstances.

From 1972 to 2002 FENSTERBANK, a sinologist, practiced his art alone and in secret, creating an extraordinary body of work. FENSTERBANK's photomontages emulate the works of 20th century greats, such as John Heartfield, Bertold Brecht and André Breton. His use of dramatic irony and his acute social consciousness of life as a permanent struggle hearken back to the Dada and Surrealist movements.

“Each of his collages speaks more than a thousand words, exposing the ridiculous tragedy delivered daily by the 'news',” explains Philippe Koutouzis, Director of FEAST Projects.

FEAST Projects exhibits FENSTERBANK for the first time. This exhibition is part of Le French May 2012 programme, and supported by the Consulate General of France in Hong Kong and Macau.

Artist Statement

"Under the pretext that it was "right to rebel" 造反有理, the Red Guards 紅衛兵, those little fascists driven by so‐called    Mao Zedong Thought 毛 澤 東 思 想 , only ended up becoming intoxicated by fuelling the hero worship of their potbellied idol, who in 1968 was aged 75 years old, the very time when the youth of Paris took to the streets to publicly denounce General de Gaulle 戴高樂将軍. But rest assured, Bernard‐Henri Lévy and his bunch are not likely to engage in any form of self‐criticism any time soon 自我批評. But why even mention that charlatan?

Deliberately iconoclastic, passionately irreverent and wilfully provocative is how I am and how I will strive to be until my last breath and my last scissor cut exposes one of the thousand and one facets of human folly. I despise trickery in any form (in my view, "Chinese pop art" may well fit into this category) and I’m allergic to blinkered thinking and political correctness, views that I see as a carcinogenic rehash of the Inquisition; and this is the way I intend to stay.

With no offense intended to the more credulous types and trend‐followers out there, I personally did not wait for Stéphane Hessel [author of Time For Outrage] and his heartfelt plea to suddenly feel outraged, to adjust my attitude accordingly. My university experience bears witness to this, if proof were needed: apart from dropping out in my second year of law, I spent just two months at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris. Make of this what you will, but I cannot even claim that philandering was the reason I managed to complete my studies in journalism, an exploit that proved utterly useless since I never aspired to competing with Patrick de Carolis, the best‐known of my fellow students. This is where the mystery deepens, for I went on to pass the entrance examination to the IDHEC Film School in order leave the institution. Still, it’s true I learned Chinese at the Oriental Languages Institute. So what! I should have studied Japanese...

But let’s return to our sheep, specifically those of Panurge * with regard to those teenagers brandishing their Little Red Books when they would have better spent their time secretly reading a good old erotic novel from the Ming dynasty. Instead, these novels were a favoured target of these mindless fools’ book‐burning ceremonies. As for the pseudodoctrine of Mao, the Great Helmsman 偉大拖手的所謂思想, a kind of soybean curd that is as insipid as it is flimsy, I prefer the thoughts of a certain Pascal, author of these unforgettable lines that I never tire of quoting: "Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness". Without realizing it, my mother echoed his thoughts (although indirectly) on the day she discovered me cutting out pictures from an old copy of Modes et Travaux magazine (one of her bibles) when she exclaimed, "My goodness, this kid has gone completely mad!" No response required.

For a staunch Jansenist, dear old Blaise Pascal was not lacking in humour (unlike my mother, I might add). Speaking of humour, I can’t wait to savour samples of it Made in China. But, as they say, that’s another story."

-Fensterbank