Awol Erizku refuses to be typecast
Much more than the photographer behind Beyoncé’s viral pregnancy announcement, the multi-hyphenate artist arrives in Hong Kong with his street hieroglyphics
Awol Erizku has just arrived in Hong Kong, but he hits the ground running. This isn’t his first time exhibiting in Hong Kong, and talking to him you’d think he’s already been living here. The Ethiopian-born, New York-raised artist likes to explore the hiking trails, DJ at friends’ bars, and wander through Kowloon’s infamous Chungking Mansions.
“There’s a friend of mine who would show me around, and he was instructed not to ever take me there. I was like, ‘We’re definitely going,’” Erizku laughs as he tells me this. Chungking Mansions’ multi-storeyed, souk-like global microcosm filled with a million things to buy, eat and experience takes him back to another time in life. “It reminds me of [New York’s] 28th Street. When I was in high school, I used to go to buy fake watches and there’s people selling whatever. To me, it’s familiar and welcoming. It’s not a scary place.”
Erizku is also a fan of celebrated filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, whose nostalgic, moody scenes of 1990s Hong Kong, and especially Chungking Mansions, make the city as much a character in his movies as any of the actors. Hong Kong’s neon signs, as few and far between as they now may be, hold a particular interest for Erizku, who sees their buzzing vibrancy as a “universal motif”, a notion that informs his own neon light sculptures.
This time, Erizku is in town to open his latest exhibition, at Ben Brown Fine Arts, in Wong Chuk Hang. Titled “Quaquaversal”, it’s an electrifying series of paintings, bronze sculptures and fluorescent light installations that continue his examination of “street hieroglyphics”. These symbols make up part of Erizku’s Afro-esoteric manifesto, which questions the pedestal upon which Western aesthetics, beauty and colonial hegemony all sit.
Erizku’s work often asks the viewer to suppose a world where Afro-centric aesthetics and culture were the norm, rather than those of the West. His wide range of mediums have the broad, easy fluency of one for whom prolificness is intrinsic: he transits seamlessly through portrait and still-life photography, sculpture, fluorescent light installations, paintings, film and mix tapes.
