How this artist finds sci-fi inspiration in bamboo scaffolding
Best known for coming-of-age comic Gleem, Freddy Carrasco is now putting on his first Hong Kong exhibition, ‘Return to Nothing’, at WKM Gallery in Wong Chuk Hang
Freddy Carrasco is in the midst of an existential awakening when I arrive at his studio, tucked away in an unassuming walk-up building in Tsim Sha Tsui.
It’s a scorching Hong Kong summer day. Inside, cool air blasts from air conditioning and high ceilings offer relief from the heat, while exposed red brick and dangling vintage “Edison” light bulbs create an industrial feel. But it’s the view outside – glimpses of Kowloon’s dense skyline veiled by bamboo scaffolding and green mesh – that preoccupies Carrasco, a Canadian artist of Dominican heritage.
“Do you know what a tesseract is?” he asks, before explaining its use in geometry and science fiction as a four-dimensional cube, a shape that represents space’s three dimensions and time as the fourth. While human perception is limited to three dimensions, Carrasco sees the fourth as a kind of purgatory because it speaks to his interest in how we exist locally and universally.
His four months in Hong Kong have extended a spiritual and artistic journey that began when he first moved to Japan, in 2018, fuelling a practice rooted in the exploration of life, death, religion and transformation.