Dezeen Magazine

Shai Langen daubs bodies with paint for Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away

Music: Amsterdam material designer Shai Langen made sculptural headpieces and covered models in hand-painted patterns for Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away music video.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

Langen was approached by the Dutch artist's manager with a brief for "something less conventional", and was given complete artistic freedom in his approach.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

The video opens with a close up of a gleaming paint-covered black and white surface, which is gradually shown to be the form of a person.

"The human body is a central theme to my work, wherein I'm more often looking for a state between liquid and solid," he told Dezeen.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

"Where the body loses its archaic form and is able to transform into new ones. The dichotomy between the synthetic and the organic plays together with this idea," Langen added.

The camera zooms in on the lower back and arm, and as the person stretches the paint moves and the patterns also subtly shift.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

The whole upper body of the model is revealed, with their head and face concealed by a large rectangular headpiece, also dribbling paint and covered in the same splotchy pattern.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

As the film continues another arrow-shaped headpiece is introduced, which stretches the width of the model's shoulders and is covered in alternative lines of slowly dripping black and white paint.

The headpieces were made from lacquered and reinforced cardboard, and although one of the oval-shaped pieces shown is almost as large as the model's body, others that didn't make the cut were two metres high.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

The paint that covers the models' bodies is a mixture of wallpaper paste and acrylic paint, which Langen chose as a simple technique that would let the material itself create movement.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

The designer previously created a collection of experimental materials, made by combining liquid latex with calcium nitrate, for his graduation project Chimera at the HKU Utrecht School of Arts.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

"I had already done some experimentation with wallpaper paste that I wanted to look further into," he explained. "After experimentation with different techniques and materials, we decided upon acrylic paint and headed into the 'tribal' direction."

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

After applying paste, the designer smeared paint onto the models' bodies using cocktail sticks and rollers to create various patterns.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

"Because of the slowly dripping wallpaper paste, the patterns slowly change and become more intricate. Getting the right consistency of wallpaper paste was rather tricky," said Langen.

Jo Goes Hunting's Run Away by Shai Langen

"The song is about having lost someone at a young age, and letting go of the worries and troubles you have," Langen concluded. "The video itself is an abstract visualisation of this. I took the idea of 'tribal' rituals and its costumes and masks humanity has created to commemorate and honour our deceased. These 'tribal' bodies in the video change and their patterns wither."

Run Away is taken from Jo Goes Hunting's Glow EP, which was released earlier this year.