Chris Hawkes works towards highly processed paintings by collaging refined images sourced from his life and environment with gestural marks, flat planes of colour and abstracted forms. He is a winner of the Incentive Awards from the Seoul National University. Hawkes’ paintings sample multiple visual languages and reference existing styles and movements. His work can be seen as being connected to Pop Art, acknowledging the role of signs and simulations within representation, however he deliberately re-engages with the auto-biographical and personal behind the ‘empty signs’. The artificial relationship of taste and gender in our culture interests him, where something with an association to a gender can substitute as a sign for female / male. Planes of colour draw suggestion to commercially feminised objects. A gesture that references Abstract Expressionism becomes camp when rendered in mint green or pastel pink.