Varad Bang was training to be an architect in Ahmedabad when heartbreak came. Soon, the teenager from Aurangabad (now Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar) would also end his studies, just a year ahead of graduation, to embrace another love—art. More than half-a-decade later, Bang is today a contemporary artist resetting the mood for love for the viewers of his works.
“There is a certain beauty in heartbreak. It is not only pain and sorrow,” explains Bang, 25, whose first solo show at the Gallery Pristine Contemporary in New Delhi is an attempt to break down the great complexity of love and longing into much simpler elements of life. The Weight of Love, Bang’s exhibition of oil paintings, is spurred by the scenes created by celebrated Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai in his 2000 classic, In the Mood for Love.
“It is a homage to In the Mood for Love,” says Bang, who was born in Maharashtra’s Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar and joined Ahmedabad’s CEPT University before dropping out three years later to pursue painting in Florence, Italy. “Twenty-five years after it was made, we are making it a three-dimensional experience,” he adds. The result is a colourful set, made in collaboration with designer Sumant Jayakrishnan, which takes the viewer back to the 1960s’ Hong Kong, which was Wong’s own set and story in the film.
Eighteen oil paintings that Bang made in the last one year and a half, send the viewer back to experience the emotions exhibited by In the Mood for Love’s Hong Kong actors— Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan and Maggie Cheung’s Su Li-zhen. Some direct from Wong’s movie and some others imagined by the artist, the oil on linen are aided by Jayakrishnan’s craft in recreating the 1960s’ Hong Kong, an era of sweeping changes in the former British Colony into which Wong was born. There are carpets and curtains—all in red—and old era fixed telephones and even an old radio surrounded by flowers and bamboo plants. Even a famous street in the film, which was shot in Bangkok, Thailand, is recreated for the show.
“I had a storyline of images to choose from in order to translate them into a spatial feeling emotionally,” says Jayakrishnan, known for his works in Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta’s 2005 film Water, and British theatre director Tim Supple’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2006. “Colour tonality is very specific to Wong’s film. I was left to look for clues to create a feeling of the lighting that is left as memory. You light it gently and let it evoke the film,” he adds.
The mood of the paintings, which go from a splash of colours to minimalist frames, renders a subtle touch to the emotions of Wong’s characters, both lonely creatures who see their love flourish and fade. Bang, who painted the works at his studio in Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, was drawn into Wong’s film as an art student at the Florence Academy of Art, which had notable alumni like US artist Colin Berry and Swedish artist Nick Alm. The movie reminded him of 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, especially his use of lighting. Bang realised, as he enjoyed watching the movie, that he was a witness to the characters and a particular place that became the mise-en-scène of the Hong Kong auteur’s remarkable work. Bang carries on the epiphany to The Weight of Love which welcomes the viewer to intrude into the privacy of his characters.
Bang’s first solo show follows the artist’s “turning point” two years ago when he painted a self-portrait, dressing himself up as Chhatrapati Shivaji. “It was a turning point in my understanding of oil painting,” he says. “The self-portrait pushed me to colour and variety.”
The exhibition is on till May 11.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer.