Christian Marclay's giant woodcut prints of screaming faces inspired by Manga

The expressive artworks are created through a combination of collage, digital technology and traditional printmaking techniques, and have a haunting, mask-like quality. His emotionally charged hybrid cartoon characters, often crying or sweating, emit a silent yet explosive energy with multiple narrative potential.

A starting point for this body of work was Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's lithograph print The Scream (1895), one of the most enduring and recognisable artworks of modernity. Like Munch's iconic image, which depicts a shrieking figure, Marclay's characters express an existential trauma that is seen but not heard.

"A lot of my work is about how an image is expressive of sound, how sound is expressed visually," explains Marclay. As with his well-known onomatopoeic works, these new prints reflect this concern. Making a correlation between visual scale and its sonic dimension, they suggest a notion of amplification, creating what curator Tom Morton has identified as 'mental collage' through the projection of a 'silenced' cacophony of aural and visual effect.

Christian Marclay's Screams is on show until 13 January 2018 at White Cube, Hong Kong.

All images courtesy of White Cube