Wipe Out: an Explosition of Invader in Hong Kong

Invader is going back to Hong Kong. The French artist, whose tiled space invaders have been turning up on the corners of cities around the world since the late 1990s, opens his first solo exhibition in the city next month. Its title, Wipe Out, says plainly what it is responding to.

The 2014 invasion

Invader works in waves. He arrives in a city, puts up a set of mosaics over a few days or weeks, and logs each piece, with a points value, in a running count of his global invasion. Hong Kong had already received two waves, in 2001 and 2002, about two dozen pieces between them.

Early in 2014 he came back for a third wave, his largest in the city: 48 new mosaics across Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, including pieces in the local idiom, such as a nod to the cartoon character Hong Kong Phooey. Within weeks most of them had gone. The Highways Department took the view that unauthorised works on public structures were unlawful and raised safety concerns, and removed them. The artist was taken aback by the speed and thoroughness. He has described the removal as a planned operation by the local authorities, and said that nothing like it had happened to him anywhere before.

The exhibition

Wipe Out: An Explosition of Invader in Hong Kong is his reply, and it runs at The Qube, PMQ, from 2 to 17 May. PMQ, on Aberdeen Street in Central, occupies the former Police Married Quarters and has recently reopened as a centre for design and creative businesses, which gives a show about official removal a certain irony. Le French May, the city’s annual festival of French culture, is a partner in the exhibition, as is the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Foundation.

The show sets recreations of the removed mosaics beside photographs of the originals in place on the street, so visitors can see both what was made and where it once stood. New pieces draw on Hong Kong itself: dragons, dollar signs and Doraemon, the robot cat from Japanese manga, sit beside the familiar eight-bit aliens. There is a sculpture made in tribute to Bruce Lee, and the show also includes Invader’s first works using LED lights.

Stickers, a book and an app

Vending machines built for the show dispense souvenir stickers. A book accompanies the exhibition, and so does FlashInvaders, the smartphone app Invader launched in 2014, which lets people photograph his mosaics on the street to score points and can be used inside the exhibition as well. All proceeds from sales at Wipe Out go to Pathfinders, a Hong Kong charity that supports migrant domestic workers who are pregnant or have young children.

Why it matters

The episode touches a nerve that runs through all street art: work put on a public wall can be taken away by whoever controls the wall. Most cities buff pieces one at a time, often slowly and inconsistently. What made Hong Kong different was the scale and speed of the response, which removed almost an entire invasion in a matter of weeks. Invader’s answer is characteristically mischievous. Instead of arguing, he has turned the loss into the subject of a show, rebuilt the pieces for a gallery, and pointed the money towards a local cause.

The full record of the invasions, city by city, is on the artist’s own site (space-invaders.com).