Trevor Yeung

“Garden Cruising: that camouflage” is a solo presentation of Trevor Yeung at Frieze Focus. Yeung combines works from different stages of his practice, including the large-scale site-specific spatial installation Between Water (2019), which suspends mid-air at eye-level an orderly grid of 25 cups of water, their in-between spaces viewers must carefully navigate to experience the art fair booth. Other works consist of readymade assemblage objects of Cacti series (2016-present), lighting installation the Night Mushroom Colon series (2020-present), and his Enigma and Garden Cruising (2012-present) photographic installations series.

Like a sentence taken apart and recombined, Yeung constructs an intimate semiotics of desire, creating a space where artworks become metaphors and signifiers for the emancipation of everyday aspirations towards human relationships. In this matrix of relational spaces, desiring objects, and natural imageries, human and non-human actors are immersed into a structure thoughtfully orchestrated by the artist. Yeung’s “Garden Cruising” allows for meaningful interaction and connection, but only in a certain way.

“Not everything is about you” is Trevor Yeung’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Continuing with his practice of personifying botanic ecology and inanimate objects to articulate human emotion and relationships, he examines the way we manoeuvre through our social habitat, delving into the complexities and unspoken rules defining the way we interact. Conscious of cultural codes during his travels, Yeung reflects on the strain on interaction during the pandemic and the increased time spent with oneself. Dissecting psychological nuances of co-dependent relationships, unmet expectations, and communicative frustrations; he reveals multi-layered sentiments on his observations. For Yeung, this learning curve is essential, as after all, not everything is about ourselves.

Night Mushroom Colon is a mixed-media work that combines electrical converters and nightlights, giving out a stealthy bioluminescence that suggests a secretive realm. Inhabiting dark corners unlikely to perturb a sleepy walker, these mushrooms thrive in fecundity, and reproduce through polysemous converters and tempting colours. Their casual disinterest to human hegemony and agency provides a viable alternative for multispecies entanglement and survival.

“there’s something missing” is a solo exhibition initiated by artist Trevor Yeung. Installed temporarily in a private residential flat in Kowloon, “there’s something missing” includes 5-6 newly made works by the artist, a conclusionary process of sorts for a year passed. They are made of personal memories and private desires, such stuff as dreams are made on, as our little life this year will soon be rounded with a sleep. The exhibition is by appointment only. Hourly time slots are available, with no more than two people visiting at once. Venue: Wontonmeen, Lai Chi Kok Road

Mr. butterflies at a waiting corridor is an immersive site-specific kinetic installation, in which butterfly palms, a common indoor plant, are placed on slowly rotating pedestals, and colorful lights cast iridescent shadows into the surrounding corridor. Like being in the atrium of a cocktail party or the entrance hall to a concert, participants have to accommodate the proximity of others and navigate the corridor accordingly, while always in the lookout, waiting for someone who might not show up. In these anthropomorphic plants, the artist sees his own personal anxiety in a place where to see is also to be seen.

The two Rock Sitter works comprise the Sitter series, an on-going series of Yeung’s, where he voyeuristically captures images of people in leisure or deep thoughts. Some of these subjects are disinterested and blasé, some immersed and oblivious, some resigned and abject. By observing the subjects, the artist projects his own desire and state of mind onto them, a process transferred as well to the viewers.

Trevor Yeung’s meticulously hand-built mixed media objects, such as hollowed seashell sculpture prompts viewers to reevaluate their relationships with the representational world, and thus themselves.

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.

Trevor Yeung’s second solo exhibition at Blindspot Gallery, “In-between”, is conceived as a meandering walking path by a solitary wanderer in an anonymous park. Neither going east nor west, neither day nor night, neither belonging nor outcast, the wanderer has no particular destination or itinerary in mind, and instead strays to his own reveries. Yeung deepens his existing practice on ecology and botany by exploring a wider range of medium underneath the terrestrial plants and critters, utilising materials such as stones and minerals, soil and clay, dust and debris. The artist relays a ubiquitous yet idiosyncratic state of in-betweenness evident in the personal growth of beings and the aspirations for meaningful relationships.

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.

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?

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.