Art collective Dirty Paper consists of Chan Wai Lap and Yau Kwok Keung. The two met in junior college when they both majored in Graphic Design. Lap went on to become a graphic designer while Keung continued his study. After several months of working, Lap determined on a full-time artistic practice and this teamed up with his old classmate. Keung and Lap started operating under the name Dirty Paper since 2010.
Dirty Paper worked mainly with recycled paper in their initial days. They wanted to capture a lost sense of unbridled creativity often see in young children, and adapted to use materials such as oil pastel and HB pencils. They allow the edge of their palms to smudge the drawn marks on recycled paper, forming a texture that is remindful of our early school days.
Dirty Paper was a participant of last year’s Pop! Up Market, an Osage Sigma Sqaure project, and this year they are invited back for a feature exhibition at Osage Kwun Tong. Departed from the previous way of co-authoring, in the forthcoming "Yesterday's" they will be showing individual works alongside collaborative efforts, in order to demonstatrate their distinct artistic dispositions.
Dirty Paper draws upon their past experiences and creates works that speak in the language of nostalgia, reminiscence and collective memory. The two members of the group display works that illustrate their individual pasts alongside their collaborative works. Lap finds inspiration from his high school years: he was initially fascinated by school uniforms—an antiquated social device that has lost its relevance, yet nevertheless prevalent in post-colonial Hong Kong. Lap also revisits dogmas and lessons in discipline we all have encountered in high school, questioning the effectiveness of these indoctrinating decrees from a sarcastic perspective. Keung suffered the loss of his beloved pet cat, and when event took a turn for the worse he lost his digital photo library to an unexpected hard disk failure, resulting in the loss of many of his cat’s picture. Keung attempts to reverse the effect of his amnesiac mishap and in the process questions the objectivity and validity of one’s own memories.
Nostalgia is a central theme that runs through the works in the exhibition. The concept came from the punishment of copy writing. The futility and absurdity of this form of punishemnt has incited Dirty Paper’s interest in mocking it. Instead of copying out of obligation, Dirty Paper began to exhume old school report card and making handdrawn copies of them. Their motivation to do this was not out of punishment, but to enjoy the action of documenting and looking at the past. This inspired them to have the concept of recording their memories. Nostalgia seems to have a close connection with repetition, while reminiscence seems to be an act of designating one’s own identity.
Keung is dedicating his section in the exhibition to his late cat, which lived with him for seven years. Keung recounted his intimate moments with his cat, with whom he had shared many of his private thoughts and deepest secrets. The string of mishaps follwong the death of his beloved cat resulted in some sort of memory void for Keung. The works that came out of this were Keung’s effort to reconstruct his lost memory. “I see it as a fill in the blank exercise”, says the artist, “and the works I will be showing are very personal, they are a meditative process for my bereavement of my cat.”
Lap’s section revolves around his secondary school years. It all started when one day, on his commute to work on an MTR train, Lap noticed the variety of school uniforms he saw. School uniforms have been rendered obsolete in many Western culture, but nonetheless remained as a cultural heritage in post-colonial Hong Kong. “We have been working with this topic for three years now, and still I find this to be an unrelentless source of inspiration, ” Lap said.
Image: © Dirty Paper, Osage Gallery
