Hong Kong

Painted the year he visited the city, Hong Kong documents Jean Michel-Basquiat’s perception of the journey in April 1985. During that time, the rising star of the contemporary art world travelled with Michael Chow, a socialite in art and the owner of the upmarket restaurant chain in multiple cities. Centering the work are two gnarling heads depicted in the artist’s iconic anatomical style that resemble lion dance, a form of local traditional dance in lion costume to bring good luck and fortune. With the copyright symbol on King Kong, this not only labeled the figurine exclusive to Basquiat, but perhaps also signified the work as his memory and experience in the exotic city that no one else could “copy”.

The 1980s was the golden age for Hong Kong film and Cantopop, and Basquiat was very likely to have experienced parts of it during the two-week visit. In the lower left corner of Hong Kong, the artist scribbled references of mass culture: the unreadable electronic circuit symbols, a series of words, like treble, picture, and sharpness, that associate with TV user manual, as well as the acronyms “UHF” and “VHF” that can be identified with radio, which was the main music streaming site back then. Chow recounted in an interview about the trip and this work, “he always picked up local culture… he recorded everything with his drawings, and Hong Kong was somewhere that was very exotic for him, so he automatically picked these objects.”