Ben Brown Fine Arts is pleased to present our forthcoming exhibition The world is your oyster at the Hong Kong gallery. As part of the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association’s (HKAGA) SummerProgramme, the exhibition is organised by Hong Kong-based curator Juliana Chan with the aim of highlighting local artistic talents and fostering the Hong Kong arts community. The exhibition features works by LAU Hong Lam, LO Lai Lai Natalie, Mindy LUI, AmyTONG and Gavin YIP. The artists, hailing from various disciplinary backgrounds, will be exhibiting together for the first time in this group exhibition.
The exhibition’s title, The world is your oyster, is a congratulatory wish to these five Hong Kong artists at the dawn of their careers. Stripped of its metaphorical meaning, the famous idiom is borrowed to describe how the food we eat (the oyster) is a product and reflection of the complex modern food system (the world). The contrasting difference between an oyster and the whole world also alludes to the huge gap between our food consumption and its industrial production.
As we sit at the dining table today, the distance between our plate sand the origins of our food is tremendous. Spatially, the food we eat often travels thousands of miles before it lands on the shelves of supermarkets; physiognomically it appears processed and packaged, reminding us very little of its creaturely origins.While the commodification of food intensifies, alienation becomes the defining character of the human-food relationship. Not only are we physically distant from the origins of what we eat, the abundance of luscious food imagery on social media and in advertising betrays our psychological disconnection with food. In his 1957 collection Mythologies, Roland Barthes described the exaggerated photographs in culinary magazine as ‘cooking meant for eye alone.’ The phenomena whichBarthes commented on is essentially what we today call ‘food pornography’ - a display of food so sensationally and artificially idealized that is detached from both reality and nature. It is a self-perpetuating cycle of desire and commodification that ultimately creates a disconnect between our natural world and the food industry.
Gallery address: 2/F, The Factory, 1 Yip Fat Street, Wong Chuk Hang