THE VAFORD GATES

VAFORD GROUP

presents

THE VAFORD GATES

Inaugural murals by world-renowned artist INSA (UK)

Paramount Building, No.12 Ka Yip Street, Chai Wan, H.K.

A crowd of journalists, stylists, architects and designers showed up Sunday for the painting of the inaugural mural of The Vaford Gates by UK artists INSA. His signature high heels and heart-shaped bottoms adorn the gates of the Vaford Group Warehouse and will be up until later this year.  The Vaford Gates  are rotating murals that will feature local and international artists.  They are an initiative to vitalize the arts district of Chai Wan and to draw the eyes of the international art world to Hong Kong.

INSA worked tirelessly from noon to well into the night to music and the encouragement of bystanders.  His two murals are the first of many to come.

By utilizing a wall space for rotating murals, Vaford Group hopes to revitalize Chai Wan’s art community and draw international attention to the art scene in Hong Kong. As in the case of the Bowery Mural in New York, public art murals invite an influx of new businesses and arts related activities to the area. Chai Wan is becoming the new art destination district and this exciting initiative will only prove to expedite the development. The Vaford Gates, sponsored by Vaford Group, will bring the cutting edge, hip, public art programming that Hong Kong needs in order to stay on the forefront of the international public art movement.

Vaford Gates kicked off this August with two shutter gate murals by internationally acclaimed artist and designer, INSA. INSA established himself from a graffiti background through extensive street level work and gallery shows around the world. He has undertaken many private commissions including recent works displayed at TATE Britain.

INSA’s canvases and installations are often hyper real, finely crafted creations in which sexual desire and commodity-fetishism merge and contrast. Always with a heavy sense of irony, INSA visually exaggerates the notion of objectification meets commoditization with graphically depicted oversized body parts that are suspended in the controlled architectural lines of a sneaker or bold black and white graphic patterns. INSA uses these powerful patterns to play with and distort the spaces where his work is installed to entice the viewer into the ‘fantasy’; a shallow fantasy of materialistic aspiration where objectification is flaunted as a symbol of wealth and success.