Frog King: Totem: an Evolution

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 Hong Kong 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, À}Ì«>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 UÊ}ÀÕV«>, 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 Contemporary Art, 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 Guangdong 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 sculpture 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 South China Morning Post 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.

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