Join us for a rhetorical delusion or heartfelt self-affirmation, “Welcome 😣 Take a Seat Wherever (cringevibing on a downward spiral)” explores the emotive language of Gen Z as well as implications of being terminally online in a confusing, almost pathologized, schizophrenic state. Taking humour as a point of departure, the exhibition looks into the why’s and how’s of memetic irony: why do these devices share an affinity among Gen Z, and how are these memes—in Dawkins’ terms and in a contemporary vernacular—disseminated?
In true Derridean fashion, nine participating artists play with ellipses and clashes in meaning, langage, visual cultures, and clichés. They draw inspiration from their mediated realities and make sense of their subjectivity through video, sculpture, painting, installation, exe file, and appropriated design image-objects.
This event is a part of the final project presentation of Curatorship Incubation Programme organized by HART.
Participating Artists
Miri
Jenn
Noura Tafeche
Janice Kei
Ringo Lo
Brandon Bandy
Rachel Jackson
E8mkboy
Cas Wong
Curator
Angela Liu, Institution of Niche
Date & Time
Opening Reception
13.08.2023 | Sunday | 4-6pm
General Visit
13.08.2023 – 03.09.2023 | 11am-9pm
Location
Tomorrow Maybe
4/F, Eaton, Hong Kong
About the Artists
Jenn (b. 1998)
Jenn is an educator and technical artist. Playtesting different emerging technologies in game development, virtual production, AR/VR, 3D asset optimization, and real-time streaming tools, Jenn works as a Lecturer in Creative Technology & Design at LCF, University of the Arts London. Jenn is a co-founder of Xalon, a networked learning community project that has participated in Ars Electronica 2021, Posthuman Symposium, CIVA Vienna Media Arts Festival (2022), and Architectural Association visiting school unit 5 (2022). She is also a member of Off World Live, an engineering and research group for Unreal Engine Creators.
Her digital showcases and artwork were exhibited at Epic Games Innovation Lab (London 2023), W1 Curates (London 2022), Toxicfest at Tick Tack (Antwerp 2021), MCG21XOXO (Matsudo 2021), Tutorial at BSMNT Gallery (Leipzig 2021), and have been featured on SHOWStudio, DIS, Visual Atelier 8, Red Eye, Art Asia Pacific, O Fluxo, AQNB, and Tzvetnik.
The artist currently lives and works in London.
Miri
miri♡ is a performer, doll and streamer. Miri was an active contributor to lolita, rave culture and digital art Usenet groups and initiated the first global kandi exchange group on the Internet. After logging off for several years to focus on monastic religion, she returned online as a co-developer of several anonymous entities across network spaces. She is interested in hypercitational aesthetics and in developing technologies to help mirror-souls find each other across nonlinear time.
Her work has appeared in Girlism, godsdirectcontact.org, AQNB, thejogging, Best Sunday Dress, tinymixtapes, Kera, Dolly Dolly, and various group exhibitions; she has performed at places such as Shelter (Shanghai), C3AFA (Japan), Internet Yama-Ichi (Korea, Austria) and Cosplay Oneesan (USA). Her first full-length visual novel is due in December 2023. She sometimes uploads art, music and texts online.
The artist currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
Noura Tafeche
Noura Tafeche (she/her) is a visual artist and independent researcher. She graduated in New Technologies for Art at Accademia di Brera with interest in net.art and radical entertainment and continued her university studies in Philosophy. She works in between installations, neologisms, laboratories and miniature drawings. Her works deepen the study of online visual cultures, the aestheticization of violence on digital platforms, linguistic experimentation and visual representation of speculative theories.
She has exhibited, held workshops and lectures at Transmediale and Disruption Network Lab (Berlin), Foto Colectania (Barcelona), Place Ville Marie (Montreal), Triennale Milano (Milan), John Cabot University (Rome), Piccolo Teatro di Milano (Milan), Dutch Art Institute (Arnhem), Stevenson Gallery (Baltimore), European Union Representative Centre (Jerusalem, Palestine), amongst others.
The artist currently lives and works in Milan.
Janice Kei (b. 2003)
Janice Kei is a multidisciplinary artist from Hong Kong, specialising in image creation through photography and digital collages. She extends her experimentation as reflection in video works, fashion styling and installations. Inspired by contemporary cultures and paradoxes, she hopes to capture through experimental processes her perceptions of reality and explore the notions of chaos, dilemmas and the unconscious.
While currently studying media cultures in London, her artistic journey has largely been self-taught. Her works have been exhibited in group shows such as Xhibit (2022) and Future Cave (2023). Her photograph works were published by magazines such as PAP and commissioned by brands and music artists including DropDead and Sophie Powers.
Kei currently lives and works in London and Hong Kong.
Brandon Bandy (b. 1994)
Brandon Bandy is a transmedia artist and publisher living in Southern California.
His work parses images, cultural signifiers, online spaces, and conspiracy while aiming to analyse the extreme present. Coming from a commercial image production background, his work is largely informed by the use of commercial processes as a way of analysing the culture and media they perpetuate. Much of his work is interested in the idea of de-virtualization, which entails using online information as a recipe for the creation of physical objects, which are then mediated through the use of photography.
Rachel Jackson (b. 1997)
Rachel Jackson is an artist, designer, and publisher based in Southern California.
Her practice surveys the present-state of image transmission in an effort to understand how the utopian potential of a networked society has been largely undermined by its commodification. Her work parses through internet trend cycles, design history, and content aggregation sites to examine the increasing role digital technologies play as conduits for image consumption. As a digital native coming of age during the advent of Web 2.0, her online experience has been defined by an aggravated feedback loop between identity and commodity as platforms incentivized the rise of the profile as a means of attaining sellable, hyper-individualised data. She seeks to unpack this phenomena while attempting to actualize the collectivism once promised by information technology.
Ringo Lo (b. 1997)
Ringo Lo's works are mostly born from music, stories, unofficial history, and hyper self-awareness. With his creative processes encompassing mixed-media work, installation, and text, Lo purposefully uses ‘wrong’ means to tease the ideas of labour and art-making. Through storytelling, Lo makes desperate attempts to analyse and reason with sentimental experiences with logic. With a few of his peers, he co-founded Ipseng, a local artist collective. He has also published in the local zine “MYEW!”, and the arts and literary criticism magazine “SAMPLE”.
Lo is recently invested in the ‘double’ nature of the world: nothing is unique; there is no individuality; all things come in pairs.
The artist currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
E8mkboy
E8mkboy is an online persona, visual artist, and a lover of love, the idyllic, and alternative modes of care and intimacy. E8 channels its fantasies—fairy tales often featuring leathered-up dominatrixes and its doe-eyed, bondaged, submissive and breedable self—online and in its vibrant paintings. It also works with mural paintings, Roblox, and video. It does not claim to be a femboy nor catboy, contrary to popular assumptions, and whether or not their stories are authentic is of unimportance.
E8’s works have been exhibited at Art Central 2023, its solo show at Running Ashtray, and other online domains.
The artist currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
Cas Wong (b. 1997)
Cas Wong (aka princessbuddha3000) is a Hong Kong-based artist. Graduated in Film Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University, he works in video, digital graphic, painting, installation, and performance. In 2019, he co-founded Virtue Village, an artist duo and a curatorial project that explores contemporary spirituality, queer subcultures, and fetishism. His works have been extensively exhibited at PHD group, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Present Projects, Negative Space, etc.
Wong currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
About the Curator
Angela Liu
Angela is a writer, curator, daughter, girlblogger, gaslighter, esoteric empath, and a collector of Sylvanian Families and Hello Kitty.
Angela is interested in exploring the nuances and intertextuality between art and other networked facets of culture in the age of hyper-referentiality. Her research delves into the role of digital archives and cyber nostalgia in inspiring current art forms and music genres, the (re)construction of signs and vernacular in the online spaces of queer music subcultures, the adaptation of memetic language models within the local meme community, amongst many other topics that she nano-hyper-fixates on. Her interdisciplinary approach has largely been informed by her time as an undergraduate of comparative literature and art history in the University of Hong Kong, as an editorial assistant and copywriter in music media platforms and local independent record labels, the video essays she has binge-watched by avoiding work, as well as a general affinity to distract and divert attention during conversations.
Angela runs the photo archive and blog No_web_deep_love, documenting the local dance music community and (underground) rave cultures. She also co-founded Shimai Tribe, a queer collective that marries music parties with a critical deep-dive into the aesthetics of said themes. She has started, put on pause, and is considering rebranding her schizo-posting meme page @kitty_off_duty, because she finds her content to have become mid and in dire need of a second comeback like Gaga.
She has published Dreaming of Electric Sheeps, a zine collection of interviews with local independent musicians. She has also worked with independent filmmakers, musicians, and art organisations on storytelling, production, and art direction for various video and film projects. Between writing about music, studying digital visual cultures, and hosting parties for queers and goths, she enjoys rotting in bed and being present.
To aggregate her nuggets of knowledge into communal, tangible projects, she has started the Institution of Niche as a space to bring together friends and creatives and big brains of different niches.
The exhibitions and their contents are independently curated and created. They do not reflect the view or opinions of HART Collective Limited.