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Christian Marclay's giant woodcut prints of screaming faces inspired by Manga

Artist Christian Marclay's Screams is a new exhibition at the White Cube gallery in Hong Kong, launching today, which features a series of unique, large-scale woodcut prints of screaming faces inspired by Manga books and other comics.

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A visitor stands before two large black and white woodcut prints of screaming faces displayed on white gallery walls, part of Christian Marclay's Screams exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong

The expressive artworks are created through a combination of collage, digital technology and traditional printmaking techniques, and have a haunting, mask-like quality. His emotionally charged hybrid cartoon characters, often crying or sweating, emit a silent yet explosive energy with multiple narrative potential.

A starting point for this body of work was Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's lithograph print The Scream (1895), one of the most enduring and recognisable artworks of modernity. Like Munch's iconic image, which depicts a shrieking figure, Marclay's characters express an existential trauma that is seen but not heard.

"A lot of my work is about how an image is expressive of sound, how sound is expressed visually," explains Marclay. As with his well-known onomatopoeic works, these new prints reflect this concern. Making a correlation between visual scale and its sonic dimension, they suggest a notion of amplification, creating what curator Tom Morton has identified as 'mental collage' through the projection of a 'silenced' cacophony of aural and visual effect.

Christian Marclay's Screams is on show until 13 January 2018 at White Cube, Hong Kong.

All images courtesy of White Cube

Minimalist gallery interior with two large black-and-white woodcut prints of screaming faces hung on white walls beneath skylights, with sculptural display case visible on left
A gallery visitor stands in a minimalist white room viewing large black and white woodcut prints of expressive screaming faces on the walls, with geometric ceiling lights above
A black and white woodcut print of a screaming face with expressive features hangs on a white gallery wall beside an open doorway
Woman viewing four large-scale black and white woodcut prints of screaming faces hung on white gallery walls beneath skylights at White Cube, Hong Kong
A minimalist gallery space with a large black and white woodcut print of a screaming manga-inspired face hanging on the white wall
Three large-scale black and white woodcut prints of expressive screaming faces hang on white gallery walls under linear ceiling lights
Two framed black and white woodcut prints of screaming manga-inspired faces displayed on a white gallery wall beneath skylights
Minimalist gallery space with a framed black and white woodcut print of a screaming face hanging on white wall, adjacent to dark shelving unit filled with books and magazines
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