In his first solo show in Hong Kong since 2013, locally-based artist João Vasco Paiva expands on his favored rhetoric regarding humanity’s interaction with the environment and the spaces we inhabit. Paiva has used the exhibition title, “Green Island,” as a point of departure, presenting it as a dissection of the ironic relationship between a Hong Kong cement company’s agrarian name (Green Island) and its urban product. The immersive exhibition at Edouard Malingue Gallery radiates a feeling of familiarity, partly due to the quotidian nature of the work’s materials, which include large, concrete-cast water bottles and cement bags. However, the works also appear superficial and foreign, because of the artist’s manipulated staging of these materials.

The sand bed valleys into a carved pathway, leading visitors to a more hidden area of the gallery where other sculptural objects are organized haphazardly. Three white pieces of what appear to be discarded packing materials, all produced in cement resin, occupy the walls, while another concrete-cast water bottle, and two more of the Green Island cement bags seen earlier, fills some of this other space. Overhead, an eerie guitar strum melody haunts this enclave, creating an atmosphere of loneliness reminiscent of scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie.

The most intricate work in the show is the installation The Highways Department Colouring Book (2016), which consists of a small notebook that contains Paiva’s detailed technical drawings and a wooden dolly on which the book lays open. The pages feature austere technical drawings that Paiva copied from the Hong Kong Highway Patrol’s published blueprint plans. To break from the usual utilitarian applications of such designs, Paiva has shaded in areas of the traced architectural drawings, in doing so creating what resembles a coloring book—essentially a tool for stress relief and childs’ play.