This Melbourne Artist’s Latest Show Is All About Painting You and Your Mates

Melbourne visual artist Mark Chu posted a call-out on his Instagram in December for photos of friends.

“Do you have photos of your squad I can paint? I’m gonna make a series of crews and mates hanging out,” it said.

He received “thousands”, from all over the world. 

Twenty became immortalised on canvas for Chu’s Say Cheese exhibition, opening at Wollongong’s Egg & Dart Gallery this weekend. 

It’s an unpretentious idea: to honour cheap digital snapshots, of late-night hangouts, pre-drinks around sharehouse tables, bus stop poses and couch cuddles, with permanent paint. 

But because the acrylic texture is gummy, the faces are blurred and the hand gestures or clothes are distorted — almost like they’re AI-generated — the final renditions are far from the photos that may have been originally composed for an Instagram grid. 

“Squad goals” — the hashtag that sparked the series idea — is a weird concept to Chu. 

“I always found it interesting that people were so overt about basically saying: these are the people who are going to make me look good,” he told VICE.

“We do choose our friends in part to represent ourselves, and it's that collective image of that crew of friends that you'll look back and go, yeah, that was my identity, framed by those people.”

Chu is also a data scientist who is currently researching bias in search engine images and how different occupations, or groups of people, may be represented — or misrepresented. He considers himself quite analytical. 

When he reflects on the ways he uses social media, he said he could think of people in his networks whose opinions he cares about, but nothing more. 

“When I put stuff out there, I care about people's opinions who I don’t really like,” he said.

“Aside from their opinion of me, which I want to be good, I didn't care about anything else about them. I wanted the like, I wanted their attention, but I feel like sometimes it's only one-way validation that we really care about.”

Chu’s paintings anonymise their subjects — partly because Chu doesn’t know anything about any of them, not even their names — and move the focus from the individuals to the collective and its dynamics. 

He selected which photos to paint based on technical factors like lighting, but he also looked for those moments when bodies jerked into positions just for the camera, and what he thought the friends were trying to communicate through their poses. 

“I think sometimes people don’t fully know,” Chu said.

“I love the hand signs because they’re almost like a vocabulary. With blokes it’s always the middle finger, they can’t seem to get past that.

“But then, collectively, they are saying something pretty clearly about the time and about what they’re vibing. And maybe like how tough they think they are or how fashionable they think they are. It’s almost like, what can you get away with?”

The squad paintings will be hung alongside paintings of people actually using their phones, which further examine how phones change our body language and show how we contort our faces, necks and hands both in front of and behind the screen. 

But the power of Chu’s collection, which brings new permanence to fleeting moments, he said for him went beyond the paintings. 

Even in the call-out, when people (including myself) trawled photo galleries for cool and interesting photos of their friends, hoping they might be interesting enough to paint, Chu said people told him that reflecting on these photos semi-immortalised the memories it in their own heads more than before.

“Instead of all those slightly negative and competitive feelings of, ‘I want to make sure that people give me the likes,’ [people were] going, ‘Actually, this is a nice photo. My friends mean a lot to me and I actually feel really proud to share it.’”

Aleksandra Bliszczyk is a Senior Reporter for VICE Australia. You can follow her on Instagram here, or on Twitter here.