Valerie C. Doran Frog King: Totem: An Evolution

n inimitable force unto himself, Frog King (a.k.a. Kwok Mang Ho) is a pioneering conceptual and performance artist who A has been breaking boundaries in and beyond since the late 1960s. Frog King’s artistic awareness is marked by a deeply integrated hybridity derived from dual roots based in two very different aesthetic-philosophical systems. One root draws from elements of Chinese cosmological philosophy that underlie all Chinese traditional art forms, in particular the connective mutability of the five elements of water, earth, fire, metal, and wood. In different manifestations these elements and their transmutations are present physically throughout Frog King’s work. The other root draws from the contemporary “art is life” philosophy of influential artists like Alan Kaprow and Fluxus artist Naim Jun Paik, early exponents of the happening and of the dissolution of the divide between artist and audience/art and daily life. In Frog King, the creative and philosophical DNA of these seemingly disparate and even incongruous sources of influence have mutated into a being of enormous creative vitality and a kind of all-embracing, life-affirming anarchy.

Left: Korean video artist Nam Jun Paik wearing "froggie sunglasses" for One Second Live Body Performance, 1994, New York City. Right: Mother and son wearing "froggie sunglasses" for One Second Live Body Performance, Àœ}̜«ˆ>ÊUÊ Hongkornucopia, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

This quality of hybridity is represented in the amphibious nature of the frog and captured in Frog King’s seal or emblem of the abstracted frog face, whose two triangular eyes also imply a bridge or a pair of sails as symbols of connectivity. The art historian David Clarke has described this “froggy” emblem as a kind of totem that marks Frog King’s universal tribe. In fact, this sense of the totemic is embedded throughout Frog King’s work. Each of his objects, actions, and environments represents a fractal embodiment of his conceptual utopia, containing within it all the

Vol. 15 No. 2 21 energy and history of his being-ness in the world, up to and inclusive of Frog King enthroned in his Frog’s nest, Frogtopia the temporal moment in which a work emerges—a moment that it often UÊœ˜}ŽœÀ˜ÕVœ«ˆ>, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of simultaneously commemorates. Any combination of these objects may the artist. be incorporated by the artist into a larger environment—his Frogtopia— within which he resides as king or shaman, dressed in his totemic Frog King costume. From within his world, Frog King extends open invitations to the audience to become his equal partners and guests, to enact “one second” or “one minute” performances with him, to create “live body installations,” to be photographed in a pair of his outrageous, colourfully constructed “froggy sunglasses”—and thus become part of Frog King’s visual archive of a decades-long, worldwide project, marking us all as equals in play, whether celebrity attendee or random passer-by.

Formerly a student of the New Ink Painting master Lui Shou-Kwan—one of Hong Kong’s seminal and influential experimental ink artists—in his early years Frog King (who at that time still went by his real name of Kwok Mang Ho) was already considered to be something of an enfant terrible: curious and disruptive, original and incorrigible. Frog King relates how he was so frequently tossed out of studio classes by his exasperated teacher that he took to making cassette recordings of Lui Shou-Kwan’s classes so that he could play back them back when he was actually ready to listen— days, months, or maybe even years later. Lui Shou-Kwan’s core group of disciples included artists who were to become major figures in Hong Kong’s contemporary ink painting scene, such as Wucius Wong, Irene Chou, and Leung Kui Ting, each of whom developed a distinctive voice and innovative methodology. But Frog King was the true iconoclast, becoming one of the earliest Chinese contemporary artists to explore the use of ink painting as a conceptual tool, integrating it as both action and material into multimedia installations, totemic columns, performances, happenings, and assembled

22 Vol. 15 No. 2 Left: Frog King, The Column, 1988, mixed media installation with two live turtles and 100 USD notes, Visual Arts Society 15th Annual Show, Shatin Town Hall, Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Performative installation by Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) at Epoxy Group’s Art Mall event, New Museum of , New York, 1992. Courtesy of the artist.

meta-environments, incorporating discards, everyday objects, fragments of torn and sometimes burned artworks, and a multiplicity of photographs, photographs of photographs, photocopies, and copies of copies depicting previous Frog installations, happenings, and other kinds of adventures in the artist’s life journey across time and space.

Born in province in 1947, Frog King moved with his family to Hong Kong at the age of five, in the exodus from the mainland that followed in the wake of the Communist revolution of 1949. His mother, by all accounts a very strong woman, became the principal of a primary school and his father worked as an agent at one of Hong Kong’s international shipping ports. Frog King says that both his parents—one a disciplined educator dedicated to the education of young Hong Kong people, the other in a position of encounter and engagement with the world, had an enormous influence on him. On many levels, opening minds and encountering the world are both essential aspects of Frog King’s way of art and of life. Although in some ways his trajectory in his early years was on the surface fairly straightforward—studying art at Hong Kong’s Grantham College of Education, getting a job as a primary school art teacher, participating in local exhibitions with the Hong Kong Art Teachers’ Association and the Hong Kong Visual Arts Society, bonding with friends like sculptor Tong King-sum—Frog King’s iconoclasm was always in evidence, and he frequently created a kind of benign havoc with what was at that time in Hong Kong a rather unusual propensity for the conceptual and the performative. His first experiments with burning wood and other materials “to see what I could produce through the destruction of one element”1 in fact began in the late 1960s at Grantham College, as did his adoption of the habit of constantly documenting his encounters and his experiments through photography, the products of which became essential resources in his work.

By the early 1970s Frog King had moved to rural Yuen Long in Hong Kong’s New Territories, where he set up an artist’s studio, taught art in a

Vol. 15 No. 2 23 local primary school, and began Secondary school student and Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) his explorations—both deliberate enact a Big Plastic Bag Action with a live cow, Yuen Long and ingenuous—into the concept countryside, Hong Kong, ca. 1971. Courtesy of the artist. that “life is art.” He often involved his bemused but enthusiastic students in his experimentations with and installation and his explorations of the borders between culture and nature and between the discarded material and the pure form. The ubiquitous plastic bags that dotted both town Art students taught by Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) from Hoi and countryside were of particular Pa Street Government Primary School participate in his Big interest to him, and he explored Plastic Bag Action, Yuen Long, Hong Kong, 1970. Courtesy of both their positive and negative the artist. forms, how they held air and how they were able to become transformed through this relationship with the air both inside and outside of them. (Decades later the young Hong Kong conceptual artist Pak Sheung Chuen would engage with similar phenomenological qualities of the plastic bag as both a material and a space.) He would often take his young students on tours of the countryside, and they would use what they found to make art. In 1974 Frog King held his first conceptual art exhibition in Yuen Long, with the participation of his students, creating works using plastic bags and transmuted materials such as melted plastic pipes and burned cow bones—materials that he would continue to use in one form or another in other works and exhibition contexts. In 1976, the interviewed Frog King, and he recounted some of these explorations during the five years he had spent teaching in Yuen Long.

When I can’t decide what to do I just go out on a bicycle and ride around the countryside. Sooner or later I find something that gives me a new idea. It may be a piece of wood or a lump of scrap iron. I take it all home. Fortunately, I have space to keep these things.

In Yuen Long I have made friends with all the rubbish collectors. They all know the kind of materials that interest me. The market people know me too. There is no art gallery in Yuen Long, so I walk around the market every day, treating it as an art exhibition. I talk to the villagers about the old ways of life. I find out about the original cultural roots of the villagers. And this all helps me to bring my work closer to nature. When I started teaching in Yuen Long people did not accept my ideas. There have been three principals in five years but I have remained throughout. Today I feel that people understand more of what I am trying to do. I have taught the students to see things in a new way. They all enjoy the work and are always interested in what I am doing myself. The students do things like

24 Vol. 15 No. 2 making a growing sculpture, combining different living plants together. When I take a lesson we go out into the countryside and design a fishpond, using a string of plastic base to represent the fish.2

Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) enacts Plastic Bag Happenings at Tian’anmen Square, Beijing, 1979. Courtesy of the artist.

Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) In 1979, Frog King made what enacts Plastic Bag Happenings at Great Wall, 1979. Courtesy proved to be an important trip to of the artist. Beijing, as one of a group of artists from the Hong Kong Visual Arts Society invited to participate in an exhibition at Beijing’s Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. In typical fashion, he soon wandered off on his own to stage his now-legendary “Plastic Bag Happenings” at Tian’anmen Square and the Great Wall. This is historically recognized as the first example of performance art in China. With China just emerging from the shadows of the Cultural Revolution and with few people having had contact with any form of contemporary art practice, clearly mystified Beijingers either pointedly ignored the artist, stared at him like he was a madman, or playfully followed him around, with a few intrepid students volunteering to help him out with his installation set-up. For Frog King, the main point was the creation of an experiential space of transformation and the documentation through photography of the process. In her 1985 book Modern Art in Hong Kong, Petra Hinterthur describes Frog King (again doing art under his real name, Kwok Mang- Ho) as a “painter, sculptor and environmental artist who also organizes happenings and performances . . . most famous for his controversial use of plastic bags that he either paints or ties to a staircase, bannister, pavements and even along the Great Wall of China. Sometimes he also piles them up in backyards and fields. Kwok occasionally paints his plastic bags with Chinese ink, fluorescent paint, gold or silver, but he always wants them to reflect his deep concern about our environment.”3

In looking back at some of Frog King’s activities in Hong Kong during the 1980s, one sees what a dynamic presence he was, someone very connected

Vol. 15 No. 2 25 to a whole spectrum of Hong Kong artists across generations and practices, despite his iconoclastic ways. One example is the Art Festival that he curated for the town of Tuen Mun in Hong Kong’s New Territories in November 1978: A series of exhibitions and happenings whose participating artists included everyone from the ink painter Wucius Wong to the eccentric senior artist Luis Chan, the expressionistic painters Gaylord Chan and Chu Hing Wah, and the young rebel sculptor Antonio Mak. At the opening of the event on November 6, Frog King improvised an experimental happening, in which over two hundred people participated, involving, of course, plastic bags.

Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) and friends at Kwok Gallery, Little Italy, New York, 1982. Courtesy of the artist.

In 1980, Frog King left Hong Kong Kwok Gallery Opening Party, February 8, 1982, Little Italy, to study in New York in a quest to New York. Courtesy of the artist. find more room to express himself and to experience the stimulation of more like-minded spirits. In short order he rented a tiny flat above a kung fu studio in Chinatown and enrolled at the Arts Students League, where he took classes until 1984. With his energy, curiosity, and a quirky form of entrepreneurship, Frog King organized and participated in numerous performances, happenings, and artist-led exhibitions, formed the Epoxy Group of expatriate Chinese artists with Ming Fay, Bing Lee, and Esther Liu, among others, became Visual Art Director of the multicultural music and performance group Yomoma Arts (1984–91) and in 1982 opened his own Kwok gallery for experimental and performance art, which managed to survive on a shoestring for two raucous years.

He soon became known for his energetic, eccentric calligraphy, Froggie Ink Paintings, and his wild cacophony of site-specific structures and environments made variously of string, ladder frames, and folding screens, and layered with a visually and experientially powerful chaos of discarded

26 Vol. 15 No. 2 Left: Froggie face emblem incorporating imagery of a bridge and sailboat, c. 1980s. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King) enacting Live Body at Kwok at Lung Tin Village, Hong Kong, 1981. Photo: Henry Chan. Courtesy of the artist.

objects, fabric, snapshots, plastic bags, fragments of former paintings, and, even on occasion, amphibious animals such as turtles or snails ensconced in specially designed tanks. It was in New York that Frog King began to really evolve and disseminate his Froggie persona and where he created his emblematic hybrid image of the “frog face” that is also a bridge of connectivity. It is dizzying to realize the multiple platforms Frog King was able to find or create for his art during his early years in New York—from the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where he showed his Frog Installations and Frog Paintings (1982), to his Floating Hamburger Box Poetry and Performance event at New York’s famed La Mama experimental performance space (1988), to the Shit Show exhibition he organized at his eponymous KWOK Gallery, and the “Hot Sundays Park Performance and Outdoor Installations” he created with his group (1986). Given this wealth of activity, as well as the fact that he periodically returned to Hong Kong and other cities in Asia to stage events and show his work, it is hard to imagine that at the time Frog King was still relatively unknown, and certainly unheralded, in Hong Kong itself, outside of the inner art circles.

Frog King with local residents In 1995, Frog King returned to enacting Live Body Installation during the Papagayo Nights Hong Kong for a longer stay to Peformance Art Festival, 2013, Orkney Islands, Scotland. help care for his ailing mother, but Courtesy of the artist. with the intention of eventually returning to New York. In the end, though, he was drawn back into the Hong Kong arts scene, once again becoming an integral part of the city’s underground visual landscape with his happenings and performances, and frequent collaborations with other local artists across generational divides. He also continued to travel, accepting invitations from all over the world to bring his unique visual and performance art to places as disparate as Tokyo, Helsinki, and, quite recently, to the most far-flung area of the Orkney Islands. By his own estimate, Frog King has participated in over 5,000 solo and group exhibitions internationally. He has been the recipient of a number of honours and awards, and in 2011 he was selected to represent Hong Kong at the 54th Venice Biennale.

Vol. 15 No. 2 27 28 Vol. 15 No. 2 Opposite, top: Chow Chun Yet in the years after his return to Hong Kong, Frog King’s focus on process- Fai, Frog King,”The taxi didn’t stop when the driver see me based/performance art, on the one hand, and his propensity to give his in costume,” 2014, acrylic on canvas, 244 x 488 cm. Courtesy works away, on the other, meant that for many years art-making was not of the artist. Opposite, bottom: Detail of a viable means of economic survival for him. So Frog King went back to spontaneous installations outside of Frog King’s studio, teaching, setting up teaching studios in Hong Kong and in Korea with his Cattle Depot Artists’ Village, wife, the Korean artist Cho Hyun-hae, and also guest-lecturing at local Hong Kong, 2014. Photo: Valerie C. Doran. universities, where he became a mentor and inspiration to a generation of younger artists such as Tsang Tak Ping, several of whom have themselves chosen alternative paths outside of the mainstream institutional and market contexts of the contemporary art world.

One can still often catch glimpses of Frog King in full shamanistic regalia, lugging his large black suitcase full of the atomic elements of his Frog’s Nest and live body installations, as he tries—often unsuccessfully—to flag down a taxi to take him to one of his myriad destinations, which might be an art event, a school visit, or a political demonstration. (Hong Kong artist Chow Chun Fai even created one of his iconic taxi paintings showing Frog King in full regalia and unsuccessfully trying to get a ride.) Visitors to Cattle Depot “artists’ village” in the industrial area of To Kwa Wan, where Frog King has his studio, are bound to encounter the territory he has staked out for himself, the boundaries of which are fluid and marked with his outdoor installations, spontaneous assemblages, and scavenged treasures.

Calligraphic graffiti inscription Frog King has been described as an by King of (Tsang Tsou Choi), Star Ferry urban folk artist, and in this and concourse, Tsim Tsa Tsui, Kowloon, February 4, 2005. other ways he demonstrates an Photo: David Clarke. Courtesy of David Clarke. interesting kinship with another self-proclaimed Hong Kong “king,” and an important (albeit unwitting) urban folk artist: Tsang Tsou Choi (1921–2007), the late, great, self-titled “King of Kowloon,” sometimes described as Hong Kong’s first homegrown graffitist. Unlike Frog King, Tsang Tsou Choi never saw nor dreamed of himself as an artist. He lived his life as one of the disenfranchised urban underclass, unable to find an economic or social foothold, and eccentrically obsessed with the idea that his ancestors had been given an imperial writ, which bequeathed to them large swathes of Kowloon peninsula as their fiefdom. To protest his family’s loss and re-stake his claim, Tsang Tsou Choi used an ink brush and a bucket of black paint to inscribe odd pieces of the urban public landscape—traffic light boxes, the sides of bridges, container walls—with his distinctive calligraphy, a kind of naïve version of the official lishu or standard script used by imperial officials in dynastic China. The Hong Kong city government would assiduously whitewash over the King of Kowloon’s graffiti whenever it came to their attention, but over the years his eccentric and passionate declarations made him an iconic, and even heroic, figure to many Hong Kong artists and activists who felt a close sense of identification with his assertive form of creative expression and his insistence on an autonomous identity. In a recent essay on Tsang Tsou Choi, artist and curator Ou Ning describes the King of

Vol. 15 No. 2 29 Kowloon’s significance as follows:

Tsang Tsou Choi’s deepest value lies in the way he directly reflects the true will of the Hong Kong people, evoking an identity of place that transcends all class distinctions. His unrelenting campaign of denunciation and protest has even made him into a kind of populist political icon, helping to consolidate the power of social mobilization. His state of madness is one in which all institutional systems and established rules are completely disregarded: from this perspective, he leaves normal artists behind in the dust.4

While the King of Kowloon’s demands to reclaim his family territory from the “empire” indeed have a visceral resonance for a number of people in Hong Kong, at the same time, this stake is a form of exclusion, a mark of possession and by extension of closing borders. By contrast, the process by which Frog King stakes out his territory is both ephemeral and all-inclusive: Like some kind of vagrant magician, he carries his ephemeral kingdom— his Frogtopia—with him, both literally and figuratively. Adorned in his Frog King costume, and usually lugging along bags or suitcases stuffed with the peculiar tools of his trade—which variously might include myriad pairs of Froggy sunglasses, homemade noisemakers fashioned of plastic bottles stuffed with buttons or dried beans, pots of Chinese ink, odd assortments of clothing, bits of coloured paper, and even parcels of dried herbs—he can transform any space he happens to be in, opening it up and making it universally welcoming to any who enter it. As such, Frog King’s “clan” extends beyond Hong Kong—it is all-embracing. While, like the King of Kowloon, Frog King claims his territory, at the same time he includes even the powers that be within his invitation. The King of Kowloon’s vivid graffiti is a declaration of ownership, and his imagined kingdom is by necessity exclusive, while Frog King’s art seeks to transform any bounded territory into a universal space of connectivity. The duality created by the reflective yet opposing natures of these two Hong Kong “kings” gives rise to a condition of tension that is cosmologically resonant yet at the same time painfully discordant: In a sense, this tension reflects the contemporary condition of Hong Kong itself. On reflection, it seems there is much more to be learned from a comparative study of the art and legacies of these two urban “kings.”

The exhibition Frog King: Totem (September 26—October 22, 2014, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong) presented a layered environment of art (and of realms) that sought to illuminate Frog King’s vibrant installation and performance work with ink art at its core and at the same time to reveal a deeper stillness at the heart of the artist’s expressive life. The main concept of the exhibition came in the form of a question, or a challenge, to Frog King himself: We have seen the whirlwind; can you dig deep and show us the eye of the storm? Frog King: Totem was meant to capture the layers of movement, of change, and of stillness in Frog King’s work: The flash of the shaman’s cloak as it is donned or as it is removed.

30 Vol. 15 No. 2 Top: Frog King working on site in preparation for the Frog King: Totem exhibition, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, September 2014. Photo: Valerie C. Doran. Bottom: Frog King using burning technique in creating a totem, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, September 2014. Photo: Valerie C. Doran. Right: Frog King writing calligraphy at the Àœ}̜«ˆ>ÊUÊ Hongkornucopia exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

In addition to the requisite site-specific Frog’s Nest created by the artist— an integral part of any Frog King environment—Frog King: Totem also incorporated dynamic new works, including the new form of “totems,” monumental action art ink paintings, and a select group of previous works spanning a period of forty years. Yet it was not meant as a retrospective, but rather offered a reflection of the energetic balance and freedom of Frog King’s approach to art and life that recognizes no borders across time and space—as well as a testament to the deeply cultivated levels of artistry underlying all Frog King’s oeuvre. The exhibition attests to a sometimes overlooked yet key aspect of Frog King’s artistic nature: that the choreographed chaos of his performances is counterbalanced, and indeed made possible, by the depth of craft, skill, and artistry always at his disposal, a level of cultivation that is apparent in the concentration one sees on his face when he is sculpting or painting, carving or burning: In that moment, he enters into a private artist’s world that comes into being in the moment of creation, and the energy whorl that emanates from within gives him a power and gravitas that is, in its own way, truly regal.

Vol. 15 No. 2 31 Among the earlier works showcased in Frog King: Totem is a set of uniquely crafted, luminous pieces from 1976 that Frog King calls his “fire collages.” These are fashioned from layers of irregular pieces of traditional lantern paper that the artist shaped by burning the edges. Frog King then marked the paper with calligraphic inscriptions consisting of readable characters or semi-abstract forms and coated these layers in lacquer from a furniture maker’s store, preserving their translucence and at the same time creating a unique texture that has an almost organic feel, as though made from the leaves of a jungle plant or the skin of an exotic reptile. When lit from behind, the calligraphic forms embedded in the works emerge like dark jewels from within the glowing core. These fire paintings represent one of the key periods in the evolution of Frog King’s artistic language, in which the element of fire and the act of burning—and thus transmuting— materials became an integral part of his creative process.

The new series of totems Frog King Kwok Mang Ho (Frog King), Fire Sculpture, 1978, Tuen created for this exhibition also Muen Art Festival, New Territories, Hong Kong. marked an important moment of Courtesy of the artist. transition in his constant process of evolution. While Frog King is known for his “frog columns” created from masses of photographs, Perspex, photocopies, and found materials, as well as his fire- sculpture towers, which he would construct from wood and burn down in performative rituals of marking and celebration, the new totems both return to, and open up a new direction for, the more purely sculpted forms of some of Frog King’s earlier works. In creating the totems, Frog King engaged deeply and energetically with the nature of the materials. Several of the major new totem began with dramatically shaped pieces of found wood salvaged from felled trees that Frog King shipped back from Korea. In the process of transforming them into totems, Frog King “attacked” the wood by using (literal) axe-cut strokes to interfere with their natural surfaces, a conceptual play on the texture strokes of traditional Chinese painting. Frog King then entered into the next stage of what he calls his “big fight” with the powerful nature of the wood, “killing it” by roughly and even violently splashing it with black ink and acrylic paint before bringing the works “back to life” through an intricate process of carving, painting, collaging, and selective burning.5

Other totems are at their core more like assemblages than sculptures per se, but they too are lovingly crafted, carved, and painted, with several of them incorporating found objects that Frog King has a special affection for and had been keeping for the right moment, including a heavy cement stand originally used as the base for a traffic signs, several shiny metal turbines from a car engine, and a collection of beautiful stones that he collected from beaches and river banks during his travels.

32 Vol. 15 No. 2 Frog King, detail of large piece of natural root Frog King, detail of root wood transformed into wood acquired in Korea, August 2014. Photo: Valerie a Frog King Totem sculpture, 2014. Photo: Valerie C. Doran. C. Doran.

Vol. 15 No. 2 33 34 Vol. 15 No. 2 Oppsite page: Detail of Froggie Frog King’s mixed-media, collaged screens are also totemic and beautifully Screen/Mobile Museum, 2014, mixed media. Photo: Valerie crafted, built up from the surface in dozens of layers of texture, media, C. Doran. genre, and expressive action. White paint brushed on to the wood surface is overlaid with fragments of other artworks, photographs, and laminated memorabilia: here a grid-patterned sheet from a school copybook is inscribed with a torn sheet of Frog King’s “Sandwich Calligraphy” patterned with a series of white dots that are inspired, says Frog King, by the markings of tribal face paint. A bold circular ink stroke cuts across the visual field, bordered by an interruption of beautiful splashes and scatterings of metallic gold dots, like imploded sunlight. As one walks around the screen, its many surfaces reveal innumerable, fragmented narratives, and it becomes clear that each screen is a kind of visual diary of many layers and many chapters. Frog King calls these screens his personal “mobile museums,” and each of them is a compendium of a lived life.

Frog King in Live Body Ink Performance with Frog Queen (Frog King’s wife, performance artist Cho Hyun-hae), Àœ}̜«ˆ>ÊUÊœ˜}ŽœÀ˜ÕVœ«ˆ>, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Frog King’s ink paintings and calligraphy are another manifestation of his own brand of positive iconoclasm: Here he extends, rather than deconstructs or destroys, the traditional media of ink painting. The absorbent quality of xuan paper, for example, might be extended to include the absorbency of a toilet paper roll or a coffee filter, which Frog King then adopts as the ground for his ink work. The movement of hand and brush is extended to the kinetic movements of the entire body, and ink might be flung by an audience member, poured from a bucket, or splashed onto the whirling body of the artist himself. This kind of experimental ink action art also has roots in Chinese artistic tradition—the “mad monk-painters” of the Tang dynasty are recorded as having engaged in various forms of action painting, in which they spouted ink from their mouths, painted with their hair and their fingernails and even poured ink onto large swathes of paper and then slid around on their buttocks to achieve interesting effects. As is proper in the Chinese painting tradition, Frog King stamps his paintings and calligraphy with carved artists’ seals bearing a calligraphic inscription or image. But rather than carving in soapstone or jade, Frog King often simply sketches out a design and then has it carved into a rubber seal by a local stamp-maker. A number of his seals are simply abstract forms that are the imprint of random objects: small plastic tubes or pieces of joinery that have caught his fancy.

Vol. 15 No. 2 35 An example of Frog King’s unique calligraphy seals, created using rubber stamps and random objects. Courtesy of the artist.

It is interesting and instructive also to contextualize Frog King’s ink art into the larger frame of Chinese conceptual art. Like the renowned conceptual artists Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, known for their invented “error-word” calligraphy and “false characters,” Frog King has also ventured to invent his own calligraphic script. Yet, unlike Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, Frog King does not does not seek to destroy meaning; rather, he seeks to aggregate it, to overlay it. This can be seen in Frog King’s signature “Sandwich Calligraphy,” which juxtaposes Chinese words with English, Japanese, Korean, or whatever other language he happens to encounter in his travels, and he often incorporates phrases from restaurant menus or overheard snatches of conversation, rejoicing in odes to the everyday. In this aspect of his calligraphic approach, Frog King also can be connected with another important mainland conceptual artist, Wu Shanzhuan. In his Red Humour series of works from the late 1980s and 1990s, Wu Shanzhuan also created memorials to the calligraphy of the everyday, copying down texts from street posters, signs in wet-market stalls, Communist Party announcements, etc., and creating floor-to-ceiling calligraphic environments of these found words—the intention of which was to expose the existential absurdity of this landscape of crossed messages. Yet Wu Shanzhuan’s exposure is meant as a constructive, rather than a destructive, act. Writing about Wu Shanzhuan’s work, critic Gao Shiming described an aspect of his sensibility that seems to apply equally to Frog King:

Different to the narcissistic focus of many artists, what has always concerned Wu Shanzhuan is the question: What concerns other people in this moment? In 1980s China, Sartre’s statement “Hell is other people” was quoted everywhere, but Wu Shanzhuan turned this concept on its head when he wrote: “God is other people.”6

It can be said that both Wu Shanzhuan and Frog King ultimately seek to use language as a metaphysical pointer towards a better way of life, but there

36 Vol. 15 No. 2 Frog King, Sandwich is an important difference in their approaches. Rather than the exposure Calligraphy, 2014, ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist. of existential absurdity that Wu Shanzhuan attempts in his Red Humour calligraphic environments, Frog King’s calligraphy is meant to celebrate the incongruity and absurdity of everyday life in the here and now and in the smallest cultural things that feed us (often quite literally, since, as mentioned, many of Frog King’s sandwich calligraphies incorporate restaurant menus in two or sometimes three or four languages). In a 1992 happening called One Sentence to Kwok, in which Frog King invited random people to write one sentence for or about him, a New Yorker named Eric Darton wrote the perceptive statement: “Kwok has never learned to speak just one language.” In fact, Frog King’s inability to speak in “just one language” means that he is never tongue-tied by the limitations of any particular mode of expression and so can leap easily and fluidly betwixt and between.

In contrast to the powerful brushwork of his ink paintings, the style of Frog King’s “Sandwich Calligraphy” script can seem childishly awkward and ingenuous—but one could also argue that this is the kind of awkward quality appreciated and even sought after by masters across time and cultures. (As Picasso allegedly once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” On the other side of the planet, and in another century, the Ming-period literatus Dong Qichang expressed similar thoughts regarding the virtues of “awkwardness.”)

Gu Wenda’s "error-word" In 2011, after his return from the calligraphy from his series Mythos of lost dynasties: Venice Biennale, Frog King staged an fake words, missing words, miswritten words . . . of poetry exhibition at the Hong Kong Fringe by Du Mu, 1986, ink on paper, 274.5 x 180 cm. Courtesy of Club entitled Nine Million Works. Hanart 100 Collection, Hong Kong. This title wonderfully captures the wild, prolific, and expansive playfulness that is essential to Frog King’s way of being and making art in the world. Yet, as we have seen, there is a more complex side to Frog King. While his works in Frog King Totem were generally free of the contemporary sheen of irony, there is often a palpable sense of social critique and the rumble of a dark side: A vibrational note of anger,

Vol. 15 No. 2 37 Left: Wu Shanzhuan, Red Humour, c. 1989, installation. Courtesy Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong. Right: Frog King performance during the Àœ}̜«ˆ>ÊUÊ Hongkornucopia, Venice Biennale, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

seen in a slash of ink across a collaged surface of images, or the explosive gesture of torn and burned fragments of paper embedded in a painting. Ultimately, it is not a lightheaded sense of anarchic cheerfulness to which Frog King aspires or turns our attention, but the importance of balance: The dark moments of human existence splashed by a sudden glow of light and the violent exclamations of the urban world countered by explosive moments of joy.

Notes

1. Quoted from a conversation between Frog King and the author, May 2014. 2. Jane Ram, “Hong Kong Diary: Always on the move in pursuit of art,” South China Morning Post, March 24, 1976. 3. Petra Hinterthur, Modern Art in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Myer Publishing, 1985), 123. 4. Ou Ning, “A Hong Kong History of Madness,” trans. Valerie C. Doran, in David Spalding, ed., King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou Choi (Bologna: Damiani Press, 2013), 166. 5. Quoted from conversations between Frog King and the author, summer 2014. 6. Excerpted from Gao Shiming’s essay “Butterfrog in a Godless Heaven,” written on the occasion of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala Thorsdottir’s exhibition Butterfrog at Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong, in 2010. It is interesting to note that a fascination with the hybrid nature of the frog is another artistic and conceptual link between Frog King Kwok and Wu Shanzhuan.

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