Intimate look at erotic pleasure
You can see Malcolm Golding's art around Hong Kong - adorning the lobby of the Kowloon Shangri-La hotel and the walls of the Bridge bar in Wan Chai, for example - but last Saturday was the first time anyone here had seen his work in an exhibition.
At the Wan Chai restaurant Tango Martini, Golding unveiled an erotic painting series he has been working on for three years. His Fun Fetish Collection - 'it's fun rather than seriously frightening,' he says - follows a theme of playing cards, with a liberal sprinkling of leather corsets and stiletto heels. The 25 stylised red-and-black oil paintings that will hang on Tango Martini's walls throughout May include characters such as the Joker (a squatting woman with a joker's hat and a disproportionately large rear), the Queen of Diamonds (a huge diamond-shaped vagina) and the King of Spades (a massive erect penis).
'They don't look as bad as they sound,' Golding says - and he's right. There's humour in the graphic paintings. One titled Obedient, for instance, is a bent-over woman in an exaggerated leather harness. The more subtle pieces invite further inspection: Where does that magnified, highly detailed zipper lead? Others are purely abstract, using geometric shapes to signify emotions such as desire and excitement.
At Saturday's opening, Golding says, he sold seven paintings, for $5,500 each. 'I was very nervous,' says the Lamma-based artist, who had previously shown the work to just a handful of friends. 'I had a couple of strong whiskeys and sat down and said, 'I'm going to just see what happens.' But people came up to me and said, 'I want that one and that one'.'
After years of painting and not trying to sell, Golding has gone into marketing overdrive, designing a pack of playing cards with images from the paintings and a line of 10 T-shirt styles, due in stores by Christmas. He also plans to open a gallery in SoHo to show his work in about six weeks.
A nonconformist from his earliest years, the 57-year-old Londoner quit school at the age of 14 to focus on art. In London, he worked as a theatre-backdrop painter, a designer of trendy clothes, and an artistic director for a gallery before signing on as artistic director for the 1972 Conrad Rooks film Siddhartha, shot in India.
Enamoured with India's 'shapes and colours', Golding moved to New Delhi, spending 10 years there and building a following among diplomats for his paintings of temples and palaces.
It was also through his work that Golding discovered Hong Kong, in 1981. Interior designer Don Ashton visited Golding's New Delhi studio and invited him to produce some prototypes for the Shangri-La hotel's lobby. Golding spent six months executing four oil paintings on wooden panels - and falling for Hong Kong's vibrancy and mountainous landscape. Another hotel hired him, subsequently, and he moved here, launching a career painting commercial spaces that took him all over Asia.
In 1997, Golding quit to focus on bringing his own concepts to life. He had never done erotic paintings before, and says he isn't 'physically involved in the fetish movement'. But he was drawn to the idea of objects being imbued with a sexual meaning, and visited the Fetish Fashion store in Central to research the possibilities.
'They have all kinds of leather clothes and whips and chains and god knows what,' he says. 'People from different walks of life all over the world are attracted to this, which was a total surprise to me. As an artist, I thought I'd seen all sides of life, but I hadn't understood this particular aspect of sexual games.'
Altogether Golding has produced 55 paintings for the series - and a double of each for himself so he won't have to part with any of them, he says. He says he believes everyone can relate to the paintings. 'We all fall in love and out of love,' he says. 'Everyone has their own sexual approach to life and inner conflicts.'
The exhibition will close on May 29, with a fetish theme party sponsored by Fetish Fashion. Golding says he'll keep experimenting with eroticism. 'This has opened a wonderful door into the surrealistic, the unknown in your mind.'
The Fun Fetish Collection, daily, 5.30pm-1am, Tango Martini, 3/F, Empire Land Commercial Centre, 81-85 Lockhart Rd, Wan Chai. Inquiries: 2528 0855. Ends May 29
