Studio Will Kwan

Endless Prosperity, Eternal Accumulation, 2009

80 lightjet prints

Endless Prosperity, Eternal Accumulation is a photographic series of eighty images of hongbao – commonly known in North America as Chinese red envelopes. The Chinese use hongbao to give gifts of money at various festivities and social events. The red envelopes can be traced back to the earlier traditional practice of distributing currency wrapped in red paper as a symbolic gesture of circulating prosperity and fortune.

The collection of envelops in the photo series are of contemporary hongbao printed by transnational financial corporations from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, East Asia, and China that are given to Chinese clients. On one level, these corporate hongbao are a crass appropriation of a traditional cultural form for branding and marketing purposes. In a second more sublimated way, the envelopes contain a complex – though often unintentional – juxtaposition of ancient Chinese iconography and script, art historical and colonial era references, Chinoiserie, and corporate logos. These juxtapositions reveal the symbolic aspirations of corporations and the degree to which corporate interests have infiltrated cultural identity.

Presented as a panorama of eighty individually framed photographs, the work also attempts to register the global scope of both financial institutions and the Chinese diaspora. The assortment of bank logos provide a contemporary atlas of Chinese settlements/markets across the world, while imagery of ships and lions and Chinoiserie patterns allude to the historical encounters between China and the West. The title Endless Prosperity, Eternal Accumulation is a play on the terminology of globalization (Immanuel Wallerstein's concept of capitalism's obsession with endless accumulation) and the grandiose literal translations of Chinese names into English (Tian'anmen Square literally meaning: Square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace).