Yinka Shonibare CBE: Dreaming Rich in Hong Kong

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA b. 1962, United Kingdom Follow +

Yinka Shonibare CBE’s work is almost instantly recognisable. A multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, painting, video and sculpture, he is best known for headless mannequins in opulent period dress, caught mid‑gesture in elaborately staged tableaux. These figures, at once sumptuous and unsettling, anchor a visual language in which art history, theatre and politics collide.

Although Shonibare often plunders Western history, art and literature for his narratives, the bodies in his scenes are clothed in boldly patterned textiles commonly read as “African”. The fabrics, however, are anything but straightforward: based on Indonesian batik, first industrially produced in the Netherlands and then exported to West Africa in the 19th century, they embody a history of trade, imitation and colonialism that complicates any easy notion of authenticity. What can appear, at a glance, as a witty, colourful device becomes a way of probing the entanglements of identity, culture and power in a postcolonial world.

Born in London and raised in Lagos from the age of three, Shonibare returned to Britain to study fine art at Byam Shaw School of Art and then at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2004 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, a title he pointedly folded into his professional name. Since then he has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and major museums worldwide; a mid‑career survey opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 2008 before travelling to the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. His Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) became a landmark public sculpture on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, and in 2013 he was elected a Royal Academician.

In November, Shonibare presents his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong at Pearl Lam Galleries’ Pedder Street space. Titled Dreaming Rich, the show extends his long‑running investigation of colonial and postcolonial histories into the present, focusing on Hong Kong’s contemporary entanglement with labour, power and wealth. Here, Anna Dickie speaks with the artist about the origins of his signature textiles and mannequins, the allegorical force of works such as Champagne Kids and Cakeman, and what it means to critique affluence from within a white‑cube gallery in one of the world’s most finance‑driven cities.

AD: You reference one of your art tutors instigating your exploration of the batik fabric by challenging you to create ‘Authentic African work’. However, how did you arrive at the use of mannequins in your work? Was there a period of trial and error, an epiphany moment?

YS: I started using mannequins after visiting the Victoria & Albert costume department, where I was inspired by the colonial dresses.

Pearl Lam Projects Hong Kong +1 location Follow +

AD: You accepted an MBE in 2004, adopting the title into your working name, but saying, ‘It was the last thing you would have expected of me’. Why did you say that?

YS: Because my work is about challenging the establishment, accepting an honour given by the establishment would have been expected to be declined.

AD: Your upcoming exhibition at Pearl Lam will be your first solo show here. I understand the works were made specifically with Hong Kong in mind. In what way can they be viewed as a critique/ response to the city?

YS: The gap between the rich and the poor—while present in HK—is not particularly unique to the city; it’s a shared universal problem.

AD: I understand the Pearl Lam space will be split into two narrow corridors, and works will literally climb the walls, evoking a sense of constriction and possibly struggle. Tell me about the decision to change the gallery space and why that was important to you.

YS: The space’s configuration is more appropriate for the kinds of works I plan to show in the gallery.

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA b. 1962, United Kingdom Follow +

AD: The exhibition will include The Champagne Kids, which features three individual Victorian children dressed in batik fabric, playing on chairs with champagne bottles in hand. Please can you tell me more about these particular works?

YS: Champagne Kids are intoxicated kids balanced precariously on chairs. Their behaviour symbolises the irresponsibility of the markets during the global financial crisis.

AD: A number of your recent works reference ‘kids’—Champagne Kids and Revolution Kids, for example. Why focus on this stage of life?

YS: Children are miniature versions of adults, and all manifestations of adult behaviour can be seen in them. Children are on the receiving end of bad adult behaviour, and they copy that behaviour.

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AD: The centrepiece of the Hong Kong exhibition will be a work entitled Cakeman, a life-sized sculpture of an aristocrat dressed in an elaborate Victorian dress made out of your trademark batik fabric.

My understanding of the work is that it will depict a man bent double carrying a precariously balanced tower of colourful cakes on his back. The press release for the exhibition states that you are interested in the ‘point at which survival turns into greed and excess’. Can you expand on this with regard to Cakeman?

YS: Cakeman is about the way that wealthy people can never have enough. It seems that the more money you have, the more you want, and people are not tired of constantly acquiring more, even when they are aware that there is a lot of poverty around. It is an expression of the gluttonous nature of human beings.

AD: Is there an irony in critiquing wealth in a gallery space that possibly epitomises wealth in a city characterized by the pursuit of wealth and where art is arguably viewed as a luxury good?

YS: Yes, you are right; it can be critiqued and enjoyed at the same time.