• Issue
  • Sep 01, 2023

Up Close: Elvis Yip Kin Bon

ELVIS YIP KIN BON, Winners Never Quit, 2019, original newspaper print, 32 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist and WMA Space, Hong Kong. 

For almost ten years, Hong Kong artist Elvis Yip Kin Bon has obsessively collected newspaper cuttings of the city’s police force arresting criminal suspects, then carefully removed any extraneous text and actors from the page, save for the suspects—handcuffed, black-hooded, wearing t-shirts on which a variety of slogans are printed. Using a strategy of decontextualization, Yip wants us to focus on these slogans and reflect on their embedded, coded language, much of which suggests an ironic absurdity and wry humor. To date, Yip has archived 40 press cuttings as part of a series titled The Day You Put Me On (2014–23), which was recently included in his solo exhibition “Overriding the Light of Day” (2023) at the Hong Kong nonprofit WMA Space.


Related Articles