Born in Portugal in 1979, Paiva is a Hong Kong based artist whose practice is informed by the complex and chaotic characteristics of metropolises. A graduate from the Porto Arts Institute, João Vasco Paiva moved to Hong Kong in 2006 to complete a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Media. Upon graduation with distinction in 2008, Paiva set to create works in multiple mediums, which consistently explore how urban spaces may serve as catalysts for aesthetic production.
Read MoreThe sounds of bustling city streets, rushing metros, and densely constructed spaces are the inspiration for Paiva's work. At the core of his practice, he deconstructs complex urban environments to create a set of identifiable codes: a universal alphabet, one may say. He systematically documents, analyses, abstracts, and reduces these observations to create a codified interpretation that is simultaneously an artwork. The aim of Paiva's artistic process is about identifying a common language that reverberates both on a local urban level as well as on an international cosmopolitan level. It is about unveiling a linguistic system, which is shared by many countries and is intrinsic to our current age of hyper-modernity.
Paiva is considered one of Hong Kong's emerging contemporary artists and has exhibited in galleries from Hong Kong and Portugal, to the United Kingdom, Australia, Hungary, and New York.