Trevor Yeung

In The borrowed relief (moon of home) (2017), Yeung constructs a mini-landscape that helps travelers ease the sorrows of being far away from home. As a metonymy of a native Chinese garden, the landscape consists of all the natural elements found in one’s homeland. The mirror at the bottom mimics the reflective surfaces of water, while the mangrove is a wooden plant that grows only in subtropical coastal areas, specifically between salt and fresh waters. Hanging by a red thread on the branches, a round-shaped jade disk symbolises the moon, a familiar literary trope canonised by the Chinese classical poetry that conjures up “ready-made” images of loneliness, homesickness, nostalgia and reunion.

Enigma series invites thinking about the relationship between the viewer and an image, about the act of viewing, as well as transforming a one-way viewing experience of art into a participatory one. Plant of fabric is placed in front of the image, to imitate how one’s view is often obstructed by other objects in real life. As the viewers navigate the space for a better view of the image behind the fabric or the plant, it induces spontaneous seeing and reveals another dimension of relationship between the viewer and the being viewed.

Our home is too small for you is an installation consisting of ready-made objects, and its major components include an Italian terracotta lion-shaped pot foot and three Chinese ceramic figurines. The work title originates from the artist’s mother’s objection to storing the terracotta lions at home based on spatial, fengshui and aesthetic concerns.

The Saddest Sunset is 3 photography works that evokes memories of a past love affair. The series deliberately avoids the decisive moments that people love to capture, but encapsulates the moment that precede and the one that follows the sunset. The photographs illuminate manmade traces that have been washed by sunlight and ultraviolet. While the nature of photography cannot be worn away, the memories of the moment captured are lost like the colours in a faded photograph.

Pineapple Sea is two installation works comprising of plants. The work revolves around the water-retaining capacity of the tropical plant bromeliad, which serves as a source of water for itself and insects, while turning the bodies of dead insects into nutrients for the plant. A metaphor for the opposing yet complementary relationship between people in the civilised society.

The impetus for Trevor Yeung’s work often stems from his inner conflicts. “The Sunset of Last Summer” opens with his memory of a past love affair. Continuing on his use of plants and horticulture, aquatic life, photography and installation as metaphors for the relationship between people in his artistic creation, Yeung also constructs a mode of narration oriented around viewing experiences through the hidden and interactive relationship between image, object, space and the viewer. The exhibition presents a kind of human inertia steeped in nostalgia and selective memory. Memories are always beautiful—in watching the sunrise and sunset, in viewing art, is one seeking some kind of pre-determined memory and imagination, or the experience of viewing?

Three sets of sculpture installations made of specimen shells are Three to Tango, Wiped off the face of the earth, and Born with Two Hearts. The series of three, works alludes to the human tendency to romanticise certain states of relationality.

In the Cacti series, specimens of fugu are rendered in the form of plants. Through this work the artist questions the nature of objects and the meaning of appearance, satirising people’s selective understanding and their numbness towards the mundane.

The Artichoke Eater is a collection of photographs and videos documenting the eating of an artichoke from peeling its prickly exteriors to savoring its soft interiors, and it is inspired by Yeung’s personal experience of witnessing someone eat the plant in this way which he describes as intimidating yet extremely enchanting. The work reveals the artist’s internalising the experience through filming others and himself engaged in the same act, where the interaction between human and plant is one of nurturing as well as consumption with erotic undertones.

In the Fish Mouth installations, the images of koi fish in a frozen pond convey a sense of covert intimidation that resonates in other works by Yeung.

A prolific artist of mixed media work, Yeung’s Sleepy Bed highlights the connection between the photographer and the photographed subjects by incorporating engraving into voyeuristic captures of strangers when they were asleep.