Herald St

Cary Kwok

Am I Turning You On

Museum St | 43 Museum St, WC1A 1LY

Of course, the bounteous variety of the spaces Kwok creates for his horde of wankers is also an exercise in style. Just as Raymond Queneau in his 1947 work limited himself to one story, told 99 different ways, to better revel in the manifold armatures of storytelling, Kwok focuses on an obsessive, repetitive subject to further flex his ability to construct different worlds around it. From suffocating Victoriana (Smoking Fags After Dinner, 2019) to Jane Austen elegance (Man feels parts in Mansfield Park, 2020), to the ‘Wish You Were Here’ series – which revels in the stereotypes of stops on the tourist trail - the artist delights in distilling a place, a moment, or a style. Kwok recalls the sheer joy of identifying a period style as a constant since childhood, when he watched a period Hong Kong film as a child, and recognizing it as a production of the 1960s. As well as watching Blade Runner, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) and the works of Studio Ghibli repeatedly for pleasure, Kwok tells me he often plays a film set in the same period as the piece he’s working on, in the background.

Did Kwok immerse himself in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) when working on an Egyptian scene, like Wish You Were Here (Take It Sphinx) (2020)? It would be hard to know what Cleopatra’s star, Liz Taylor, would say when faced with Kwok’s image of a tourist, whose mid-selfie ribbon of spunk blesses the Sphinx with a substitute nose. Kwok is open with eros, so honest about his fixations, so open with his joy that even if ‘virtue’ is hard to come by in his works, ‘vice’ hardly feels relevant either. Even when we discuss watching pornography, Kwok quickly gets back to the pleasures of style – how the cut of an actors’ hair, or the orchestration of their pubes, can indicate a film’s period – and, accordingly, can either generate a thrill (seventies, hairy chests) or kill the mood (eighties, oiled muscles) – as much as the actors’ costume, or the furniture on set. Which is not to say that setting isn’t a turn on: indeed, Kwok’s works, for all their profuse sexual activity, are in a sense most truly alive to the paraphiliac thrill of props. Witness the title work of this exhibition, Am I Turning You On (2020), in which a finger gently flips a 1920s, Bakelite style light switch in the form of a penis, or Three’s a Party (2020), which reconfigures a mid-century Danish-style bentwood couch into a chic, multi-person orgasm machine. Kwok conveys with missionary fervour the ways that furnishings can be as powerful a vessel for sexual charge as fetish gear: that anything, once invested, can set the scene for pleasure and erotic exploration.