Keep Calm and Give a Shit

Artists: Hun Kyu Kim, SOON.EASY, Tala Madani, Wong Ping

Keep Calm and Give a Shit features paintings and animations by four up-and-coming artists whose works entice us with their cuteness and familiarity, deploying cute characters and techniques drawn from comics to capture the viewer’s attention at a glance. Their allegorical images and satirical language play, however, allow for endless stories about the acute issues of our present-day existence.

The characters and events here depicted on canvas and on screen, the deployment of animation and cartooning, the repetition and variation of image: these choices of format and subject matter all might bring to mind the little LCD rectangle that occupies so much of our attention, with its famous memes and endless feeds. Here, the familiar images and characters don’t stay cute for long; embodying the artists’ sharp senses of humour, being deployed as they are to comment on or confront us with the issues of the here and now—war in Ukraine; political problems in Hong Kong; the corona pandemic, everywhere; the inescapable influence of the media and the panoptical apparatuses of surveillance and ideology it embodies—they require the audience to leave the passive consumption of the phone for an active mode of reading.

The wide-ranging subject matter and overwhelming narrative force of Hun Kyu Kim and SOON.EASY’s paintings, as do the diaristic stories of Wong Ping’s animations, resemble and refract the stories of our daily lives and the absurdities of the world around us. They deal with universal themes, but perhaps ones particularly familiar to an information-age audience of globalized urbanites, who experience the world not directly but mediated through the symbols and images edited and reconstructed within the boundaries of the glass screen.

In Fan (2020), Tala Madani sharply exposes the constant feed of unreliable information and our utter dependence on it: “What we need,” says Madani, “is not a softening of reality through beauty, not a morphine for our pain through art, but ideas for shifts in consciousness.” Even though the art we need at this point is cute and familiar, slick and unobjectionable, it has to be capable of refreshing perceptions left paralyzed, like our senses of smell, during the pandemic. In Keep Calm and Give a Shit the audience are made to question to what extent their daily lives, their heres and nows, extend beyond the bombardment of superficial images and information we experience every day, to the world of real, lived, and engaged-with thoughts and emotions these works embody.