AISHONANZUKA is pleased to present first solo exhibition with British artist Oliver Payne (b.1977) in Hong Kong.
After studying at the Kingston University Faculty of Art and Design in England, Oliver Payne began working in collaboration with Nick Relph during the late 1990s, together creating video and installation work based on skating, hardcore music, punk, graffiti, and other street culture. He has had an extraordinarily bright career as a young artist, together with Relph winning the Golden Lion award in the young artist category at the 50th Annual Venice Biennale (2003) and having exhibited their collaborative work in solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Zürich (2004) and at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2006). In Japan, they have showcased their work at Art Tower Mito (Lonely Planet exhibition, 2004) and at the Yokohama Triennale (2008). In 2009, Payne and Relph moved on to work separately as solo artists, and Payne has since been creating work mainly around the subject of Japanese subcultures.
Oliver Payne's works start from a suspicion against the world that we recognize or accept with common knowledge. In his recent performance Chill Out, he requests the participants to turn off the mobile phone, any internet system surrounding them, and stay in silence. Which seems as though Zazen -the meditative practice of Zen Buddhism-, but at the same time that is depicting a respect to the Anarcho-pacifism of the followers of CRASS -a legendary punk-rock band-. Another example is his collage works previously presented, which are composed of a barrage of stickers designed after the Japanese video game DonPachi pasted onto images of Greek sculptures torn from the pages of an old art book. These collages express how symbolic violence in Japanese video games overwhelms and dominates icons that serve as the symbolic identity of Western civilization. In another interpretation, these pieces suggest that the standardized authority on art is, in truth, born from blind faith.
This exhibition EVERYTHING ON ALL AT ONCE FOREVER will take place simultaneously at NANZUKA in Tokyo and AishoNanzuka in Hong Kong, present the installations connecting these two venues with the works based on the symbolic images derived from video games and robot-animations. For instance, the wall painting derived from Portal -a puzzle-platform video game to be played with controlling a character to solve the puzzles and have it teleported to another space through the portal-, the school desks equipped with video game emulators, a video work based on a field research, and two-dimensional works of screen print.
