An artist whose images seem to dance

Hungarian artist Szabolcs Bozo opened his first solo museum exhibition worldwide at the M Woods art museum in Beijing on Aug 4. Must You Dance features over 50 pieces of the artist's most recent works, including paintings and images on paper, as well as sculptures and site-specific painting installations created for this exhibition.

"The characters I paint are like color lumps to me. I'm in love with their randomness－the more ridiculous or outlandish they are, the better," says Bozo.

Born in 1992 in Pecs, Hungary, Bozo has become one of Europe's most promising young artists with his childlike, playful and distinct art style.

For Bozo, who did not undertake any formal academic art education, art is a part of his ordinary life, a natural expression of the unconscious and the whimsicality in the mundane. This has allowed him to develop his own unique visual language with a free imagination, coupled with a bold and conflicting use of color.

In the colorful and fantastical world that he creates, these whimsical characters are endowed with anthropomorphic qualities－wide eyes, toothy smiles, dancing and jiggling awkwardly, happy and uninhibited yet subtly unsettling.

Bozo moved to London in 2017, where he's currently based. His journey to the British capital involved a 27-hour bus trip.

He was looking for a bigger stage to practice his first interest in life, break dancing.

Back then, he couldn't speak a complete English sentence. He found a job making sandwiches and then worked as a waiter and bartender while his English improved.

There was also another hobby that he never gave up, drawing. During the restaurant's off-peak period, he made hundreds of drawings and sketches on a small notebook, which was given to him to write down customers' orders.

Bozo started to post his drawings on social media, as his brother suggested, and that's how his talent became recognized.

Rhythmic brushstrokes

Bozo's works are strongly influenced by Hungarian animation and children's books that he grew up with in the 1990s, a period which saw a creative explosion in animation studios in Budapest and beyond.

The things he read were inspired by local folklore, mythology and dark humor, an aesthetic and cultural context that was distinctly different from American counterparts.

As a former break dancer, the artist has an innate understanding of the dynamic body movement and a sense of wild physical energy－both explicitly presented in the gestural and rhythmic brushstrokes on his canvas.

In his first museum appearance in China, Bozo's creation inspired by the Chinese classic animation The Monkey King: Havoc in Heaven is exhibited alongside nearly 20 pieces of the original draft of the animation.

Produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio from 1961 to 1964, The Monkey King is one of the most influential works in the history of Chinese animation.

As part of the museum's collection, these original drafts are introduced to the public for the first time.

Personally, Bozo finds Chinese classic animations fascinating. He has previously watched some works, including Little Tadpoles Looking for Mom and The Monkey King, on TV. He's amazed by the images that absorbed traditional artistic expressions, such as folk art and opera facial makeup.

After seeing the original drafts, Bozo picked up the brush and painted the character in his imagination, an orange monkey with striking green eyebrows in the work The Jungle Party.

Puppet elements

Bozo comes from a country with a long and rich history of puppet theater. He has particularly fond memories of the Bobita Puppet Theater in his hometown of Pecs, where his mother used to take him to see puppet shows when he was a child. His favorite Hungarian animations from his childhood, such as Susu the Dragon and TV Maci, were developed from puppet characters.

Qi Yuanlin and Deng Yingying, the curators of the Beijing show, have applied elements of puppet art, such as the colorful curtains, to fill the exhibition space.

Paintings hanging in one of the galleries on the first floor are presented as if on a theater stage. Volcano Mouse and Rat from the Future are looking at each other as if they are in the middle of performing a spectacular play.

In recent years, Bozo has shown his talent to the public through many solo exhibitions, including Busojaras (Hungarian carnival) at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels last year; The Explorer at Carl Kostyal in London last year; Home Again at L21 Gallery in Palma, Spain, in 2020; and Big Bang at Semiose Gallery in Paris in 2020.

Also, the commercial value of his works is widely recognized with outstanding success at major auction houses.

At Phillips' New Now contemporary auction in London in April, an oil-and-pastel canvas work was sold for 78,120 pounds ($91,300), nearly four times its estimate of 20,000 pounds. Most recently, at Christie's 21st century art day sale in Hong Kong in May, a large painting Untitled (2020) was sold for HK $1.4 million ($178,400).

Ayanna Dozier, a staff writer of Artsy, the world's largest online art marketplace, wrote: "For Bozo, the bright graphic style is a way to grab the audience's eye and lure them into a complex, fantastical landscape of creatures inspired by the nursery rhymes and dark humor of his youth. With the current Sotheby's sale, it is not hard to foresee Bozo's successes with Asian and European markets and institutions being replicated in the US."

Deng says: "Though the pandemic is making people's life difficult, Bozo's paintings have been rich and beautiful as always. The vibrant summer is perfect for such an exhibition, especially when the summer break allows children to come to see his paintings. After being visually attracted, they might be more motivated to understand the works."

Du Lingling, a visitor to the exhibition, comments: "Style reveals the artist's character. Bozo's paintings are rich in energy and imagination. They are simple, clumsy and wild, even slightly odd. The figures in his works are naive, romantic, mysterious and cunning at the same time."

If you go

11 am-7 pm, daily except Mondays through Nov 27;

M Woods 798,

798 Art Zone D-06,

2 Jiuxianqiao Road,

Chaoyang district, Beijing.