Sweet Dreams are Made of You

Hayton Oei
Sweet Dreams are Made of You 
2021
Flashe and liquid acrylic on linen
77 x 133
$7,700

This work references Alex Israel’s New Waves and Cy Twombly’s The Rose series. It combines the iconography of the former and the compositional structure of the later to create a cultural icon for Los Angeles. Other images referenced include Hokusai’s woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.  The artist is a surfer and a lover of the ocean. At a beach, if one looks carefully enough, there are a myriad shades of color as light and shadow create a glistening spectrum of possibilities. Thus the variety of shades of blue and brown curated here are both representational and aesthetic, and the form of the wave symbolizes the rushing sensation in the artist’s mind as he struggles to determine his national identity and cultural belonging. It references the first stanza of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”:

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

As the artist’s mind surfs the waves of Los Angeles, he finds the comfort of home, and love. This wave painting is also deeply romantic as it joins two waves in union together. The romance and doubleness can be interpreted as both between artist and future spouse, Hong Kong and Los Angeles, artist and viewer, and viewer and viewer’s own love interest.