White & Her Seven Friends
Jiū Society
August 26 to September 30, 2022
Presented by Vanguard Gallery and Studio Concrete
162 Hannam-daero Yongsan-gu, Seoul
“Snow White & Her Seven Friends” is an ongoing art initiation conceived by Jiū Society. The ongoing project involves a mix of media including site-specific installations, sculptures, paintings, videos and crypto art.
The project took its title from the 1955 Hong Kong musical comedy Suit Koo Chup Yew (Snow White & Her Seven Friends) which was loosely structured around the characters of the 1937 Disney animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The 1955 film was essentially a piece of social criticism disguised as a family and love story in which the well-raised heroine escaped malice from her family for love with the help of seven peasants. The Hong Kong production took a Western love story and transformed it into a satire of the then British colony’s social injustice and class differentiation, while subtly integrated with Chinese traditional culture and feudal ideology.
Chan Ho Nam
Digital Painting, Modular led screen or inkjet printing, 55 x 55 cm, 2022
Inspired by Suit Koo Chup Yew, Jiū Society retells the story to reflect the conundrums in the post-1979 China where the artists grew up with a series of intense social and economic reformations since the country’s reopening to the world after the Cultural Revolution. The project commits to Jiū Society’s longterm observation and reflection over the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, a place they call home, where all kinds of isms, ideologies and social transformations come and go through a revolving door.
Big B Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, 2022
The special exhibition in Seoul, presented by Vanguard Gallery and Studio Concrete, will launch a collection of crypto characters, video installations, paintings, and sculptures. This is the initial phase of “Snow White & Her Seven Friends”, which introduces a cast of characters drew from classical Hong Kong gangster films. These antiheros were role models for the young generations in the 1980s-90s in the Cantonese-speaking part of China where heavily influenced by Hong Kong’s golden-age pop culture. The project’s visual manifestations took various approaches in interpreting their namesake characters as if recalling and ridiculing distant but vivid childhood memories. These works lay the foundation of a world in which Jiū Society will unleashes their unique script of life, struggle, destiny, value, and community.
Set to release in instalments, “Snow White & Her Seven Friends” is an emerging franchise that will unfold its vision in the white boxes of the art world and the uncharted water of the cyber space. Jiū Society invites you to join their new artistic venture.
Micheal
Sculpture, 3D Printing by polymer reinforced glass fiber
H 50 x W 30 x L 106 cm, 2022
Down PDF Jiū Society Works Info – Vanguard Gallery & Studio Concrete
INSTALLATION VIEW
ABOUT THE ARTIST｜Jiu Society
Jiū Society considers themselves an experimental product of “Reform and Opening Up”, and also the sons of “dispersed culture.” In the name of nonsensical hedonism, despite occasional anxieties and doubts, Jiū feels very good. So they tried to make themselves heard by making an uncertain and small sound, Jiū.
Founded in 2015 by three Shenzhen-born artists, Fang Di, Ji Hao, and Jin Haofan, Jiū Society absorbed its fourth member, the Guangzhou-born artist Zhang Yin, in 2021. The group revolves around the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area, a brand-new region forged by the Party and the people where the four artists all grew up and witnessed wave after wave of immigration, fortune and ideas. Jiū Society expects to shake up a few things in this new reality, and turns up their volume by just a bit.
