Heart Digger: Wong Ping at Cork Street Galleries

Hong Kong-born artist Wong Ping presents an exhibition at 5-6 Cork Street, in tandem with his lauded show at Camden Arts Centre – the acclaimed artist’s first solo presenta-tion at a UK institution.

Ping’s explicit ‘sino-futurism’ manifests in animation and unique environments across the two sites, an ambitious project in seductive technicolour pop language and darkly hu-morous storytelling, taking in “political and cultural anxieties, psycho-sexual taboos, and the complexities and perversities of contemporary human relationships.”

The Cork Street exhibition includes new inflatable sculptures, video installations, and two recent works; Fables 1 (2018) and Fables 2 (2019). Morality tales re-written for our dys-topian age, his Aesop’s Fables are part of an ongoing series. The artist’s creatures in-clude a convicted capitalist cow, a three-headed homicidal rabbit and a telepathic tree who become focal points of subversive domestic fantasies, holding a mirror to our own humanity.

The inaugural recipient of the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize at 2018’s Frieze, Ping is a self-taught animator, who began making clips in his spare time while working as a digital editor for a TV studio in Hong Kong. Releasing content directly and unassuming-ly through Youtube and Vimeo, his work attracted a cult online following, leading him to be invited to present within an exhibition context. Earlier this year Ping had the solo shows Golden Shower at Kunsthalle Basel and Who’s The Daddy? at CAPRI, Düssel-dorf.

Wong Ping: Heart Digger, Camden Arts Centre at Cork Street Galleries, 5th July–15th September 2019, 5-6 Cork Street, W1S