YUK KING TAN Negotiations
11 September - 29 September , 2008
Yuk King Tan is one of New Zealand's most acclaimed young artists.
Yuk King Tan has had major solo and group exhibitions, most importantly at the Camden Arts Centre in London, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, Kunstverein in Hamburg, and Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand, plus the Hong Kong Arts Centre. She has held residencies at Dunedin, New Plymouth, Queensland, Aachen, Sydney and London and has participated at International Biennials in Queensland, Vilnius, Auckland and Sao Paulo. Yuk King Tan lives and works in Auckland and Hong Kong.
‘Negotiations' is a show that highlights the artist’s dedication to mixed-media expression of global social concerns and is a groundbreaking, edgy show for the Hong Kong art scene.
This exhibition brings together videos and installations created in the last two years in Hong Kong by artist Yuk King Tan. Part of the project has been a personal and analytic examination into the values and judgments that make up the cities cultural and commercial environment. The work concentrates on small, quotidian and often underground moments that in their singularity may be irrelevant but brought together define the everyday life of a city.
In the videos and performances Yuk King Tan takes seemingly small incidents and offers twists in their everyday patterns to take them into an unfamiliar and often unexpectedly surreal situation. In the artwork casual meetings take place between people wearing plastic buckets over their head, groups of domestic helpers clean a red taxi in a lingering and yet violent fashion and an elderly street recycler, or ‘scavenger’, pushes a perfectly rendered replica cardboard copy of the HSBC lion from the iconic bank’s headquarter to a hole-in-the-wall recycling depot in Sheung Wan. The work is about journeys and small and large gestures that occur that have a significance in how we value the actions and movements of others.
Her sculptural installations often made in brightly coloured nylon tassel and string, wax and firecrackers are more materially driven installations that are often visceral and spectacular. They deal with items of consumer culture, transformed and collated into new the objects and images that assess how, and with what, that we understand an individual and wider economic identity.
‘I am interested in journeys but not just in the more obvious biographical or social terms but about the nuances and enlargement of the conceptual and political idea of migrancy; as a leaning away from a mainstream, the journey to an outer limit, a structural and cathartic direction to the area of strangeness. I think when something is unfamiliar or even ambivalent, that’s challenging, because it questions predetermined value systems and order, causing displacements and re-configurations”. - Yuk King Tan
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