Currently based in Peru, French artist Alexander Cornet (a.k.a. 111iks) has been practicing art for over 16 years across multiple continents. Beginning with graffiti and drawing, he has developed a practice in illustration, metalworking, and painting. His style is composed of intricate linework combined with complex graphic composition on a small scale, drawing the eye in towards his minute and detailed city scenes. He combines a thoroughly modern approach with visual references to ancient cultures, deepened by exposure to that of the original peoples of Peru. In each piece, he is able to deconstruct and reconstruct urban environments to better understand how culture has changed over time and space.
Specifically in the Hong Kong collection, Cornet begins the pieces by examining the vehicles. The means by which people navigate the space of the city allow him to explore the relation of people to place, in his words, “to explore its character of a dense commercial megacity, and status of gate between the Eastern and Western culture.” Blending elements of magical realism with his intensely striated linework, the visual noise begins to syncopate into the rhythms of urban life like in Hong Kong Traffic (2019), reflecting on the geometries of urban planning. The irregularities brought on by informal business, street vendors, and migrants shine through in the cascading shapes of pieces such as Dawn Market (2019) and Trade, Tradition and Technology (2019). Showing the inevitably interconnected elements of common life in global cities, Cornet is able to show how culture forms, evolves, and maintains over time in these major centers of modern life. In these times of migration and crisis, Cornet explains of Hong Kong, “being a harbor for migrants looking for a new beginning, it has been a safe place to carry on with their different cultures and traditions.” As we look forward to more transnational futures, such work is vital to understanding our new connectedness across culture, time, and space.