Laugh through the misery in Hong Kong with Joan Cornellà

Comic relief is much needed in a year like 2020. To step over the year’s dead body and into the next, one must try to find something funny in misery. Luckily, Joan Cornellà is making it easy for Hong Kong with an announcement of his new exhibition. Cornellà, a contemporary comic artist from Barcelona with over eight million followers on social media, is known for his satirical, tongue-in-cheek illustrations that deploy dark humour to reflect popular culture, raise questions about our society and reveal what it means to be alive. His wry, deadpan illustrations have landed him on the pages of The New York Times, as well as the underground comic magazine La cultura del Duodeno, El Periódico, satirical magazine El Jueves, and the Catalan newspaper Ara. His work often juxtaposes bright, cheerful, candy colour palettes and smiling faces with either bleak, sarcastic text, or an unexpectedly absurdist and grotesque element, providing social commentary and ample room for extension of interpretation with a simple arrangement of visual elements.

The Catalan artist returns to Hong Kong for the third time this December with a new solo exhibition — depressingly titled ‘My Life Is Pointless’ — this time as a collaboration with Sotheby's as well as Hong Kong-based creative studio AllRightsReserved. One of his most famous works that will be featured in this showcase is Selfie Gun, a sculpture of an anonymous man with a wide grin holding up a selfie stick, except a handgun lies in place of the expected cellphone. Is Selfie Gun commentary on our narcissism? Our obsession with performative happiness for display on social media? Joan Cornellà digresses from declaring a definite interpretation: “I prefer to have people see the exhibition and see what they say about that.” The exhibition will feature “life-sized panels, shaped panel paintings and bronze sculptures” as well as exclusive limited print works, and will be held at Sotheby’s Gallery in Admiralty, Hong Kong from mid-December to the end of January.

Hong Kong has been one of the more diligent and efficient cities in terms of combatting the coronavirus, but with the incoming chill and the many international homecoming flights of the winter, the city has entered its fourth wave about two weeks ago. With the city hitting almost 100 new cases consistently since the last week of November, the government announced its tightest social-distancing regulations yet. ‘My Life Is Pointless’ will, therefore, only be available for viewing by appointment only.

“The humour I like is related to the absurd [style] of Samuel Beckett’s literature or Monty Python. You can find many such artists and art forms with the kind of surreal comedy and black humor that offers a way to make things supposedly heavy or dark far easier to digest,” Joan Cornellà offers in an interview with Sotheby’s. To laugh is to survive. The paradoxes of life, at best, is made more easily digestible with things like humour, and — well — electronic dance music.

‘My Life Is Pointless by Joan Cornella’ will be held at from December 15, 2020 to January 29, 2021 at Sotheby’s Gallery, One Pacific Place, 88 Queensway, Hong Kong. To schedule an appointment, click here. To read more about the selling exhibition, click here.