Back stage

The studio of Eric So, Hong Kong’s toy designer, illustrator, and multimedia artist, is a man-cave – and time-capsule of Hong Kong pop culture. A life-size Bruce Lee sculpture greets us at the end of the entrance corridor, a reminder that in the 1990s, Eric So’s iconic Bruce Lee figures travelled from Hong Kong to Japan to the United States, pioneering the concept of the designer toys as art. It’s a theme that is carried over into his workspace where there are legions of toys and collectable figurines of pop culture icons and celebrities, lined up, as well as a research library of magazines and books adorned by eclectic trinkets and ornaments. It’s hard to know where to look; there is something fun in every corner.

The artist himself is soft-spoken and bespectacled. “People think of Eric So, and their instant association is ‘toys’,” he says. “When I first started, designing toys was kind of an attempt to recreate childhood,” he explains. “In the beginning I bought factory-manufactured toys, disassembled them, improved them, added new parts. Eventually I began making them from scratch, by hand, to achieve the bespoke quality I wanted. And I would crossover with fashion brands, exhibiting the figurines in stores after dressing them in the latest, hippest trends.” These two unchanging tenets would underlie Eric So’s diverse creative practice in the ensuing decades: first the quest for craft of the highest quality, and second, the childlike impulse to tell stories – of the street and pop legends and the cultures and subcultures of our generation.

His newest painting series, titled The Storyteller, achieves this in an intriguing, if initially subtle, way. Stacked about in his studio, amongst armies of figurines, it is easy to overlook these paintings, because they depict – with meticulous and exacting hyperrealism – the backsides (or the ‘verso’ in industry terms) of canvases. The trompe l’oeil technique is immaculate; exposed stretcher bars, nailed or stapled turnover margins, and even replicas of old gallery labels. Meanwhile, each canvas is shaped in an instantly recognisable silhouette of a well-loved cartoon character. The effect prompts a double take: I was inadvertently compelled to flip the work around to meet the ‘front’ of Mickey or Astroboy, only to encounter the canvases’ ‘true’ back side.

Storyteller No. 4

Storyteller No. 20

“In each work, I’ve created just the outline, or silhouette, of each character. But these characters are all engrained in our generation’s DNA. So it’s your brain that instantly and automatically does the rest,” he explains. “It’s like this concept in advertising, where the use of space must be highly economical. I’m using minimal visual cues or signifiers to refer to commonly known information, and letting audiences fill in the blanks.” Although Eric So explains his work so clearly, I still find myself walking back and forth around Mickey, trying to get my head around the canvas’s fake ‘backside’ and true ‘frontside’. Paint is daubed on the turnover edges of each work, at times strategically bleeding into the pseudo verso, allowing hints of each character’s signature colours to be seen. I ask hesitantly, “These are sculptures. They’re not exactly 2-D, are they?” Eric replies, “I would call them ‘2.5-D’.”

Faceless and expressionless, each Storyteller work tells of the backstory behind each well-loved character’s creation and development. We see Pikachu’s lightning-shaped tail, but not its electrifyingly cute expression; we see Hello Kitty’s perky ears and signature whiskers, but not her inquisitive gaze. Instead, we are invited to decode the numbers, dates, and geographical places recorded on the trompe l’oeil gallery labels – information and data that came from hours and hours of painstaking (and very geeky) research.

As a group, The Storyteller paintings invoke both familiarity and distance, and a subtle sense of intimacy. Normally, the backs of canvases, which reveal details of ownership, provenance, and exhibition history, are seen only by registrars, gallerists, or auction house specialists. The verso of even a historical masterpiece in a museum is rarely accessible to the general viewer, just as the backstage of a theatre is not accessible to the general audience. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s famous analysis compared social interactions and human behaviour with the theatre, formulating the ‘back stage’ as a hidden, private area where roles, expectations, and identity constructs can be dropped, and people can finally be themselves. By depicting the backsides of canvases, Eric So shows us the ‘true’ Mickey; one where the cheerful mouse no longer needs to perform.

For the veteran advertising consultant, making art offers Eric So himself a ‘back stage’ where he can cease to perform – for clients and corporates – and create for the sake of creating. Born in 1968, he gave up a 10-year career in advertising in the mid-1990s to embark on creative freelancing in illustration and design. While his original allegiances lay with drawing and painting, his innovative designer toys in the late 1990s blurred the lines between art, toys, pop memorabilia, and fashion. At a time when figurines were only presented at fairs or trade shows, he presented his creations as art; from 1999 to 2000, ‘The Art of Bruce Lee’ toured the world and led to a collaboration with Medicom Toys. This was a ground-breaking moment in the international art toys scene; to give a sense of context, it was also in 1999 that Brian Donnelly, a.k.a. KAWS, created his first 3-D toy edition of Companion.

Over the next two decades, Eric So’s renown as a forerunner in the field led to numerous collaborations with pop icons and artists, including Michael Jordan, Big Bang, Edison Chen, and KAWS, to name a few. He still recalls meeting KAWS when he was just ‘the kid’ who tagged behind street art and fashion giants Futura, Stash, and Russell Williamson when they visited Hong Kong in the 1990s. The two remained friends; from another stack of (regularly shaped) canvases, Eric So pulls out a life-size portrait of KAWS he had painted for an earlier painting series. “The series is titled Stand By Me – I painted life-size portraits of friends who were important to me, who were doing similar things at the time or who stood by me during my creative journey,” he explains. Speaking of KAWS’s explosive success, he declares: “It is thanks to his star rising, and thanks to his art becoming mainstream, that more people became aware of what we’re doing. ‘We’ being the creatives working on the ‘outside’.”

“There is mainstream art history in textbooks,” Eric So continues. “And then there is the ‘wild history’ on the ‘outside’, or in the ‘back stage’ – the rich cultural currents that occur on the fringes of mainstream art.” At this point, Marcello Kwan, Bonhams Head of Modern and Contemporary Art Asia, chips in: “All these boundaries are blurring, though. And Eric is on the frontline.

“This series looks at dissolving the divide between pop and high art,” continues Marcello. “The works juxtapose the flatness of cartoons versus the hyperreal trompe l’oeil; the contemporary nature of pop culture versus the tradition of painting, as well as the worlds of illusion and reality. Not to mention how the works straddle so many mediums.”

Indeed, The Storyteller works reveal Eric So’s mastery of multiple mediums: painting, sculpture, woodwork, and technology, backed up by research and trial-anderror. From conception to research to experimentation, execution, and finishing, the works required the creative knowledge of an advertising executive, the technical skills of a designer-illustrator, the obsessive-perfectionist attitude of a devoted toy-maker fanatic, and, above all, the relaxed humour of a lover of popculture and the imagination that stays forever young.

He does it all for fun. Affectionately dubbed by locals as the ‘Figurine King’, Eric So doesn’t take himself too seriously. When a Hong Kong magazine published a profile titled “Eric So: I Don’t Want to Be Placed Front Stage”, he was quoted as saying: “People may idolize what’s on a pedestal, but they’re worshipping something that’s dead, not living. I want to keep learning with everyone.”

Backstage, it is, then.

Michele Chan has written articles and reviews published in Frieze, Art Asia Pacific, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

Eric So: The Storyteller Hong Kong 1 September - 21 September Enquiries: Marcello Kwan +852 2245 3717 marcello.kwan@bonhams.com