Grass Mud Horse: Profanity, Protest, and Pop Art

After Maorilyn Maoroe got biatchslaped by flying hotdogs in Mahler Gobi desert, Grass Mud Horse invites her for a beer pong game… is an artwork created in 2011 by Hong Kong-born, Chinese-American artist Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung. It’s an image crammed with coded meanings, socio-political references, and schoolyard-standard double-entendre. An excerpt from the artist’s description of the piece reads: <blockquote> “Maorilyn Maoroe is hanging out with Grass Mud Horse […] while the Valley Dove is resting on Grass Mud Horse’s head, a group of Chinese children escort a giant peach with ‘Mahler Gobi Desert’ on it. One of them is holding 50 Cents Grass Mud Horse money, another is waving a Chinese flag with symbols of five River Crab on it.” </blockquote> Like many of Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s artworks, After Maorilyn Maoroe got biatchslaped by flying hotdogs in Mahler Gobi desert, Grass Mud Horse invites her for a beer pong game… [hereafter simply, Maorilyn Maoroe…] is a frenetic assault of iconography, a cavalcade of memes, wordart, GIFs, and poorly cropped images — the over-sugared run-off of an evening of doom-scrolling through social media. Hung’s collages draw from internet meme culture and present it at its most camp. The aesthetic is familiar to anyone who spent their formative years on the internet, having their brains hardwired by decades of digital mess. Whilst the format may be familiar, the visual language and references will be obscure to anyone who didn’t spend time on the internet in China during the early 2010s. For those who did, the digital collage has become emblematic of that period’s complex competition for control of online freedoms. <a href="https://medium.com/signifier/grass-mud-horse-profanity-protest-and-pop-art-dc572580c14d">Click Here</a>