As German artist Nicolas Lawin explained Friday, the technique of using black or colored tape to create images has existed for a long time.
But it’s only in recent years that this became an actual art form, known as tape art. The concept is simple but capable of producing vibrant images with sharp lines and a very contemporary look, as can be seen in the exhibition Tape That, opening at Meta House on Saturday night.
The works exhibited were done by Mr. Lawin and Stefan Busch, both from the German artist collective Tape That, since they arrived in Cambodia last weekend. They range from a 6-meter-long, black-and-white cityscape of Phnom Penh to a blue-and-gray rendering of Independence Monument.
Tape art first appeared in the U.S. in the late 1980s but, according to the two artists, it is in the mid-2000s that its profile began to soar.
“Tape art is basically putting images on the wall with just the medium of tape, like sticky tape rolls of different colors and shapes,” Mr. Busch said Friday.
“It comes from street art, graffiti, but you can take it off again—nothing permanent about it.”
“It’s very detailed work,” he said. “If you know a few rules, how to use tape, it can be everything. But you have to accept that it’s straight lines mostly: You can’t make any detailed curves or such, and so you have to abstract everything that you see in a way that works for tape.”
The exhibition opens at 7 p.m. on Saturday and ends October 27.
