Phillips is proud to present works by Hong Kong-based artists including Adrian Wong, Frank Sin, Chow Chun Fai, Lee Kit and Trevor Yeung. These works exemplify the city’s healthy, vibrant and diverse local art scene, one that continues to fascinate Hong Kong’s community as well as explore the interdimensionalities of the sprawling metropolis that it occupies.
Trevor Yeung’s unique practice incorporates the use of ecology and horticulture into photography and installation as a means of referencing his own intimate experiences within allusions to the simple aspirations of human relations. Within his deep preoccupation with structures and systems, he creates works that allow control over their environments, and their own interactions. Island 5030, part of his Enigma series, follows in this rhetoric. With this work, Yeung invites us to question the relationship between the image and viewer, in particular the very act of viewing. By allowing the work to protrude from the wall and enter our own space, he transforms the experience of interacting with an artwork into an act of equal, autonomous participation. As we navigate the space around the artwork in order to better understand its dimensions and purpose, we allow the experience of viewing to take on a more unique, personal tone, one that incorporates us as the viewer into the very fabric of the work itself.
Though each artwork and artist seems different and detached from one another, they are all in fact all interlinked by their very conception. Through their creations, these artists achieve a kind of self-realization, a preservation of their own ideals and practices - artistically, culturally and otherwise in a city that is in a constant state of rapid and dramatic evolution. In their eyes we see Hong Kong as a city suspended in an eternal battle between conservation and modernization. For Yeung we see his desire to create controlled, hermetic ecosystems as a product of his anxieties about the city’s increasing gentrification. Speaking of his ready-made ecosystems, Yeung says “Sometimes things change so fast, especially in Hong Kong. I like these kind of plants, because they grow so, so slowly” (Yeung quoted in AsiaArtPacific, Where I Work, Nov/Dec 2016).
What ultimately unites these artists is their fierce love for the city they occupy, its rich history and diverse heritage; a love then coupled with an intense insecurity about the future that awaits it.
