Appetite

We have appetites for a great many things. Food. Booze. Beauty. Power. Sex.

Gaston, the arrogant brat in Beauty and the Beast, likes pretty girls and pretty pictures. He would like to take Belle, the most beautiful girl in town, to be his wife. But fortunately for us, she is ‘funny’ and ‘peculiar’, more of a bookworm than a fangirl to his perfect butt chin. Triggered by Belle turning a blind eye to his courting, Gaston takes the book from Belle’s hand and asks, “How can you read this? There’s no picture”. With no way to take her book back by force, Belle quietly gives him a judgy look and replies, “Well, some people use their imagination“.

This scene is depicted in Take Away (2023). The two characters are loosely delineated. Above them hangs ducks and chicken in the manner of a good old restaurant window display in Chinatown. The painterly and gestural qualities of her painting are reminiscent of 1980s German and American Neo-expressionist paintings. These slightly unhinged characters are tangled with layers of material underneath —— photograph cut-outs of food, McDonald's and KFC wrappings, layers of paint, and a glowing gold tablecloth.

Sabrina Shah is a very ‘greedy’ artist. There are always a lot of things going on in her work, fragments of images and ideas, bits of paper, and traces of a contour. It looks like she has tried to attach everything to her work to the extent that the canvas itself almost feels greedy. Painting is a means through which Sabrina tries to make sense of past experiences. Yet there is never a straight answer to anything in life. Like the book Gaston beholds, Sabrina’s paintings do not present a straightforward picture. So, it is time for us to take Belle’s advice and use our imagination.

In contrast to her as an artist, Sabrina is a very polite and reserved character in life. As a woman, one is typically and historically cautioned about having a good appetite for food and for sex. Charged with a greedy cacophony of stimuli, to some extent, her paintings empower the viewer and herself with the licence to be free from such cautionary tales.

Sabrina also has quite a wicked humour. In her paintings, Disney princesses, soft teddies, and green dinosaurs, all of our supposed childhood good friends look more deranged than their usual selves. Is this Toy Story gone wrong? Or, do they embody the same anger as Yoshitomo Nara’s defiant boys and girls? On a deeper level, it reminds me of a more ancient artistic trop the Dance of Death. Popularised in the 15th century, one of the most well-known Dance of Death series was made by Hans Holbein the Younger in the 1520s. The figure of death, represented by an animated skeleton, roams around the world and pulls all kinds of tricks of death on the cardinal and the king, the nobleman and the cleric, the man and the woman, and the poor soul still a young child. Death is a completely reckless and fanatical character. The same can be said about Sabrina’s ‘power hungry’ bunny and her sausage dog in the shape of an Ouroboros. They embody a desperate realisation of hunger and desire for things, which could get to anyone whenever and whoever you are.

Toys and cartoons are not innocent. Roland Barthes debunked this myth for us many decades ago. Barthes wrote about middle-class French people’s toys. He made two points. First that they are not innocent, and second, toys are increasingly becoming objects of convenient pleasure. They are easy to make, easy to play with, and easy to throw away. Like fathers, like sons, grown-ups also have their toys. Happy Meal (2023) presents a photograph of the McDonald’s Happy Meal and a bunny-looking vibrator. The photograph is printed on top of a painted and collaged canvas. It is as if we have tucked away our mucky desires with things that can give us instant pleasure and make us ‘happy’. Are we truly satisfied? Can we be fulfilled?

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✍️ Shuqi C.