Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s Because Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People examines the role of the United States in the Iraq War with a lively mixture of bright colours, combining videogames, web art, advertising, TV news items and the aesthetics of psychedelic art in a collage of satirical comments on the politicians involved in the war and the media propaganda flooding society. A pin-up George W. Bush meets Tony Blair as Uncle Sam. Saddam Hussein becomes Rambo, Hilary Clinton a many-headed hydra and Arnold Schwarzenegger a cheerleader. American westerns and the Middle East fight it out through caricatures of their leading figures on the field of foreign policy as in a videogame. The more glaring the forms chosen by the artist for his caricatures, the more the spectator is made aware of the machinations behind the absurd game of power, politics and the media.
Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung makes his satirical comments on political events in computer-generated animations, sculptures and installations, primarily using the technique of collage to combine material drawn from videogames, web art, pop graphics and mass-media news items in new visual dimensions making bizarre comments on the state of the world. Transposed into the modern tools of the computer and the digital collage, the approach is similar to that of the Dadaists, who used newspaper cuttings and photographs to develop their social criticism in the 1920s.
Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung (Hong Kong, 1976) has won numerous prizes, including the VIPER International Award of Basel and an Honorary Mention – Net Excellence at Ars Electronica in Linz. He has held solo shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Brisbane Festival and taken part in various group exhibitions at venues such as the New Museum in New York, the Seoul International Film Festival, the IMPAKT Festival in Utrecht and the Shedhalle in Zurich. Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung lives and works in New York. |
