Mark Bo Chu, Inside Chill, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 35.5 x 45.5 cm. 

MARK BO CHU | SAY CHEESE

JOIN US ON FRIDAY 31 MARCH, 6 - 8PM, FOR THE OPENING OF SAY CHEESE BY MARK BO CHU.

In SAY CHEESE, Mark Chu shows how painting can monumentalise the fleeting moment. A photo may act as a memory jolt for an event, but a painting reconfigures this through other filters. Improvised gatherings of people become sculptural and immortal, fixed, canon. Chu’s works locate the compositional wildness of incidental images. A raised elbow becomes an elegant framing device, and a smoke plume serves as a perfect division across a canvas.

Mark Chu’s general project is a response to contemporary urban life through brush-marked patches and layers of colour. Within this broad ambit, the artist will generate a temporary idea to bring some containment to his interests. In SAY CHEESE the concept took shape when Chu asked to paint a friend’s photograph from a new year’s party. This then became a broader social media call-out to share group photographs of memorable gatherings.

Chu scales up of these images from the dimensions of a tiny screen to the tactile grandeur of canvas. We see the recognisable group portrait, its dimensions contingent on the scope and tilt of the camera and the way this pulls figures together in an informal arrangement. The bundle of humans creates a dynamic edge, a clumping of clothed bodies drawn in through arms, embracing or posing with hand signs, faces grinning or grimacing.

Time is at work in these paintings. There is the date of the photograph and the ever- receding memory of the event it seeks to capture. Countering this distance is the super- quick digital sharing that delivers the image to the artist. Then there is the time taken by Mark Chu to make the work – a contemplative act that fixes these animated poses into new dimensions. Time is also evident on the surface of the canvas. Many of his paintings began as palettes for earlier works. This allows for transparency and optical colour mixing, giving his populated spaces a roughed up and integrated quality.

Let’s consider all the looking and reflection going on in the exhibition. It may be self-evident but it is quite a crowd! First, we are viewers looking at paintings of people who are generally looking back at us. The paintings have been made by the artist viewing informal photographs sent to him from many locations by a range of people. The artist has then selected based on what these informal pictures offer for him visually. Behind the artworks are conversations between Mark Chu and his subjects as he continues the dialogue, often internationally and sometimes with people he has not physically met.

Mark Chu talks about the qualities that draw him to certain photographs and what they offer for painting. There are the shapes of skin blocks, how they differ from the bulk of clothing. Some paintings have a quality of flash photography, suggesting an earlier era with light bouncing off briefly illuminated apartment walls. The tender treatment and warmth of these paintings and the attention they bring to human connection counters any simple critique of social media. Mobile phones are just part of the scenery, albeit a thing that acknowledges the way digital networks have been integral to this show.

There is a dynamic line that can be drawn through Mark Chu’s far-reaching practise. From concert performer to writer, food critic and painter, the drive is for creative inquiry for all the senses. His various modes of work involve testing, pattern and variation where he assigns himself tasks to contain expansive interests. SAY CHEESE offers a highly connected series involving the artist, multiple photographers and portrait groups. Here, he acts as both painter and selector of images, allowing the essentially solo work of the artist to become a form of animated exchange, an echo back that inverts the fleeting into the iconic.

Mark Chu received a Highly Commended in the Lester Prize for Painting in 2022. He has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University (USA) and was winner of the engineering schools’ interdisciplinary design challenge. He has conducted research across the fields of cognition, technology and art, establishing a research collective that were semi-finalists in the European Commission STARTS Prize (2021). Chu has received commissions for mural work in Melbourne and Atlantic City (USA) and has exhibited internationally (Shanghai and New York). This is his first exhibition at The Egg & Dart.

Words by Melody Willis

31/03/2023 - 15/04/2023

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