As I was talking with Arnault Castel, the man behind Kapok, a shop-cum-gallery nestled in a quiet history-laden district of Hong Kong, an adrenaline-fuelled twentysomething lugging a large backpack, portfolio, and sleeping gear stomped into the room and threw his things onto the ground. Then, after a few moments of standing still, of just absorbing the hanging drawings, the handmade zines, and the miniature castle, he finally said, “You don’t know how much I’ve missed all of this.”

That a young artist hailing from Florida and living in Shanghai could walk into a former garage space in Tin Hau and immediately feel at home says something. It says something about the nature of the pieces that make up Kapok’s first exhibit, “Sleepover Psychedelia”. Curated by Samantha Culp and Adrian Wong, “Sleepover” brings together five artists from the United States who share an aesthetic drenched in the spirit of DIY, fantasy, and geekchic. Post-hippie, post-punk, post-new age, and post-pop, these drawings, zines, handmade shirts, cds, and graphics define the experience of a certain generation.

“They draw on graph paper,” Arnault says. “We all drew on graph paper.” He adds that the intricacy of these drawings create a personal universe for each of them, that beyond their childish exteriors, these worlds are already well-formed and recognizable.

These worlds may be familiar because they are manifestations of some sort of universal subconscious gone haywire, a conglomeration of the images we are constantly bombarded with and the inner worlds we dare to imagine. What happens when pop culture, video games, 60s and 80s iconography, and mythical creatures run wild in the otherworld of suburban America, where they consummate their mad love, giving birth to a new aesthetic, raging and indecipherable, yet completely familiar?

What happens? You get Thomas Galloway’s ethereal robotic figures, his “gang dudes”. And Matt Lock’s neon cavepeople sharpening their tools to the music of Don Henley and Air Supply. And Devon Varmega’s Aztec-fusion monster-cities that loom over a geometry problem set.