The Edition

“I think all artists are incredibly selfish,” says Coco Capitán from her home in Stoke Newington on a typically dreary Friday morning in London.

“Art is a very self-involved activity. You’re constantly thinking about what you’re going to create next and what you have to say for yourself. It’s tiring. Sometimes my biggest dream is not to be an artist any more. But I don’t think I chose to be one, I just think I couldn’t be anything else.”

She may sound like she’s on a bit of a downer – Capitán does after all have a cold and has decided it would be better to do our interview via video call – but context is everything. I’ve just asked her if she uses art to understand herself, and whether she sees it as a form of therapy.

“What I want to do … it comes as a need,” she adds by way of further explanation. “I need to do it, and I won’t stop until the idea is out there. But I do find it antisocial,” she adds. “You get a kind of tunnel vision.”

The idea that the act of creating art is both selfish and antisocial is particularly ironic, because right at the beating heart of Capitán’s work – which spans photography, painting and written text – is a celebration of community, belonging and human connection. And the more we talk, the clearer it becomes that she creates to help others; to help them imagine a different reality for themselves, and to find the joy in life.

This month she’s on a mission to bring that joy and dialogue to Hong Kong for the first time, and three days after we speak is due to jet off to Asia to set everything up. The 34-year-old Spaniard is debuting a three-part exhibition as part of Swire’s ArtisTree programme to coincide with Art Basel. Titled “Imagination Investments”, it includes her acclaimed solo show “Naïvy”, an interactive exhibit called Memory Adoption Bureau and I Read While I Walk, an in-situ collection of her now iconic scrawled writings spread over half a kilometre at Taikoo Place.

She tells me she’s especially excited to visit Hong Kong because of its maritime history. On the shelves behind her, sailing books jostle for space with model sailing boats and Popeye figurines – evidence of the obsession that has animated a decade of her work. But where does this obsession with the sea come from?

“I’m not quite sure. Maybe it’s the sense of adventure it brings,” she says. “If I’d been born in a different time, I would have loved to be a pirate. In my art, it’s more about this idea of a self-serving community. When you’re sailing for a long trip, the whole universe gets reduced to that tiny space, and without it, you couldn’t possibly survive. I think there is a lot of poetry in that.”

Capitán occupies a rare position in the art world – an individual with credibility in both the fine art and commercial spheres. She’s enjoyed solo shows in galleries from Seoul to Paris, shot campaigns for the likes of Dior and Lacoste, published several books of her work and shot everyone from Bad Bunny to Cate Blanchett for Vogue, Dazed and numerous other publications.

She got her big break in 2017, thanks to Gucci’s then creative director, Alessandro Michele. Paying her way through art school in London by doing photography work for the fashion house, she took her handwritten notebooks with her everywhere she went. During one project, Michele spotted the contents of the books and loved them so much he made her idiosyncratic aphorisms the focal point of his autumn/winter collection, plastering them on everything from tank tops and parasols to enormous walls in SoHo New York. He stepped out at the end of the show wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Capitán’s unmistakable writing. Within months her name was everywhere.

“I wish I’d been a little more prepared, because I think I could have made even more of the opportunity,” she reflects, nearly a decade later. “But it was a very special period of my life. I don’t think I realised what was happening in that moment. I just carried on. There was so much to do.”

Now she’s looking forward to bringing her written artworks to Hong Kong’s Taikoo Place. “I really enjoy placing text in public spaces,” she says. “It doesn’t require you to go to a gallery or even have an understanding about art. It has an impact as you are walking.”

And there’s a reason Capitán’s handwriting draws the eye. Scrawled in all caps, with the crossings-out and misspellings often left in, it features several letters back to front – mirror writing, which is common among many neurodivergent individuals the world over. “I’m incredibly dyslexic and have ADHD and, like, everything that you can imagine,” she says when asked whether that’s her real handwriting or a stylised, artistic choice. “That’s just how I write. I remember in school they would tell me I was doing it wrong. I used to write the other way around, and apparently this is quite common in dyslexic children. It was only when I was at art school that I thought, ‘Why do I have to write like everybody else? Why can’t I go back to writing how it came naturally in the first place?’”

Memory Adoption Bureau comes from an equally instinctive, humane place. An interactive installation, it not only showcases forgotten vernacular photography that Capitán has collected from around the world, but invites participants to “adopt” their own photo from her vast collection, signing an agreement to become a custodian of the anonymous snapshot before taking it home. There’s genuine sadness in her voice as she explains the reason for the concept, knowing that once upon a time these photos meant the world to their owners. Nostalgia, responsibility and meaningful connection in the present, she suggests, all go hand in hand.

Tellingly, her favourite aspect of the Hong Kong show is the mischievous advertising billboards posted up around town to promote it, which deliberately play on the city’s identity as a global financial hub. “I wanted to call the show ‘Imagination Investments’ because I wanted to create confusion when people are looking at the billboard to think, ‘Is this a real company? Is this actually an investment bank called Imagination?’ I love when art can’t be fully classified.”

The subtitle on the poster is “Further than money will ever take you”, but it’s not a judgmental, anti-capitalist dig, she’s keen to point out. “What I’m trying to say is that we spend a whole lifetime worrying about how to make money. But money itself was once an imaginary thing – it’s a man-made concept. So the real power is not in the money itself, it’s in the imagination.”

The power of imagination is a recurring theme in her work. Not just for the obvious reasons, but because she believes it’s the real currency that has propelled her from a small town in Seville to the life she now leads.

Born to a physicist father and a mother who is a chef, she says it was the latter who instilled a strong work ethic and sense of independence in her two daughters (Coco’s sister, Candela, is also an artist). “She raised us with the idea that you have to go to university and you have to study. You can choose whatever subject you want, but never marry for money. You have to work to survive.”

Capitán’s success in the art world has led many people over the years, including members of the Spanish press, to assume she comes from a rich, well-connected family. “But that’s far from the truth,” she says. “I had a very middle-class upbringing. It hasn’t been money that changed my life; it’s really been the possibility of imagining that I could do something else, somewhere else. My path has been built through imagining what can be possible and sharing this with my audience. “Invest in your imagination,” she concludes. “Because it really has been the key – at least for me – to success.”

This accidental admission that she’s been successful – which by any measure is true – prompts an immediate backtracking on Capitán’s part, and a fear of being seen as arrogant suddenly grips her. Perhaps she’s become too British since moving to London?

Spanish people are much more upfront than English people,” she laughs. “The English are very reserved and I’ve always been a bit like that, too, so coming here was a relief. But if I hadn’t spent my childhood in Spain, I probably wouldn’t be the artist I am today. I grew up far from capitalism, I had a beautiful childhood that allowed me to arrive in London [aged 17] not even knowing what the big brands were.”

That’s quite the revelation given that just a few years later she was being placed on a pedestal as a modern pioneer of the “female gaze” in contemporary fashion photography alongside the likes of Gia Coppola and Petra Collins. Hailed as champions of a style in which women were portrayed with more realism, intimacy and emotional depth than ever before, it may have kept her name trending, but Capitán wasn’t a fan of the label. “I didn’t like it. The gaze is the gaze, and hopefully one day we’ll live in a society where the gaze is not gendered. I don’t want to think that my photographs are unique because I’m a woman – I want to think they’re unique because I’m Coco.”

In so many ways Capitán defies categorisation. “Naïvy” – her nautical-themed collection of analogue photos and pared-back portrait paintings exploring themes of adventure, queerness and belonging – is at once mundane and arresting, innocent and knowing, simplistic and deeply philosophical. Capitán is interested in the messy contradictions that make us human – and she wants you to feel seen, too.

“I try for my work to be unpretentious and relatable,” she says. “I want to say: you and I are actually more similar than you realise. It’s not about the big, grand statement. It’s about – this is my everyday life, and it’s not that different from yours. Many of the things I’m thinking, you’re also thinking.”

And while some fine artists may be leery of cashing in on commercial projects for fear of selling out, Capitán clearly has no such dilemma. Walking the line between well-paid projects and fine art comes easily to her. She appreciates the chance to earn good money, just as her parents taught her, but she doesn’t have time for snobbery either.

“I love working commercially – not only for financial reasons, but because I think it’s very interesting. You get a true reflection of society when you work commercially. You get to learn what people are interested in, what they want. Brands want to sell, so they only want things that are effective, right?”

Ultimately, continuing to produce good work is what matters (“I grew up believing in real graft”) and if you reach more people with it while keeping your artistic integrity intact, all the better. It’s one of the main reasons she cried when she watched Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl in February, just two months after shooting him for American Vogue.

“I had tears of joy in my eyes,” she admits. “The fact it was so mainstream means many people saw it – many Latinos who are suffering because of what’s happening in the United States, who feel less entitled to be there … I think Bad Bunny reached them in a very elegant, genius way. I applaud any artist who can create that much optimism for people.”

So what’s next for Capitán? And does she think she can continue to make art that resonates in a world increasingly saturated by artificial intelligence, attention seekers and visual noise?

“As a photographer, I take fewer photos now because of how many pictures exist. It makes me feel completely irrelevant. So the way I’m elevating myself over that is by going back to the things that actually made me happy.”

For Capitán, that means being rooted in the physical world rather than the digital one, despite what her work sometimes requires of her.

“I prefer real life,” she says simply: meeting people in person, reading a book, processing photos in a dark room rather than on a computer. “Yes, I use ChatGPT, I use all these tools, but I try to use them as tools. I don’t want them to end up controlling me. That’s why for my practice the human factor is so important.”

And with that, she rises from her chair to give me a through-the-screen tour of her home as consolation for the fact that I couldn’t visit her in person. “Ooh, you’re into vinyl,” I say, noticing the stacks of records behind her.

“Of course! To match everything I was talking about,” she laughs. Ever the grounded idealist, she takes a beat before adding, “But I do also have a Spotify subscription, too, I won’t lie.”

“Imagination Investments” runs at ArtisTree and across Taikoo Place until April 26