Yellow Saga

Yellow Paints, borrowed yellow objects 
size variable upon installation
2022


https://yellowsaga.space



How is yellow digested in this society? I examine how yellow colours have gained
multi-layered meaning in society throughout history.





First, yellow saga, I collected yellow paint colour swatches and their retail names from department stores. With the names, I composed poems, and with the colours, I made wall paintings. The colours and names are combined as a chain of vocabularies to stimulate the imagination. The imagination invites you to the multi-layered visions hovering over the colours beyond their meaning.
 









































In front of the wall painting, viewers could scan the QR code on the glass and read the poems on their mobile while contemplating the wall paintings.

https://yellowsaga.space











Muted Overjoy, I borrow yellow objects from the community surrounding the gallery for the exhibition. The random everyday objects will be juxtaposed in the gallery, and the installation will be set side by side with the wall paintings. The domestic daily life of someone becomes part of a field of encounter and amplifies the viewer's inspiration while they see the colours on the wall and read poems on the website.









As an Asian woman who has only been living in Canada for five years, learning about the colour yellow as an identifier of Asian people is a new concept for me. This project is a way in which I explore all the different colourizations and verbalization of yellow.


















Hate during the pandemic was a potential everyday threat to my body. It clearly existed, but it was like a shadow of daily life that did not exist before it appeared to me. It was like the coronavirus, with a heavy ambience in the air and full of fear and imagination. I hope the viewers can explore and envision their own stories of yellow in the show.

















































Mark
Anthropo-Bosai

Collab With Stefan Sollenius
soil, plants, bio materials, ceramics, mirror
size variable upon installation
2021






Anthro-bonsai is a research-creation project that my collaborator (Stefan sollenius) and I recently began at the OU Gallery Residency for a month in March.
We seek to explore and expand the metaphor of bonsai in the context of the Anthropocene.













































Bonsai is a traditional Asian art cultivating miniature trees. They barely survive through intense human intervention - branches are twisted and restrained, bodies and roots are aggressively pruned, and the soil is too shallow for the tree to grow. However, humans have been fascinated by contemplating these dwarf trees for centuries considering bonsai as the essence of nature. 

In 2021, the way bonsai are generated and treated reminds us of the violent human intervention and exploitation of the earth. We questioned, "If the bonsai has symbolized the essence of nature, then what can now be the essence of nature in the Anthropocene that we should contemplate?".  In this changing environment with accelerating pollution, it must not be just the beautiful trees in the forest that bonsai represent.







"If the bonsai has symbolized the essence of nature,
then what can now be the essence of nature in the Anthropocene
that we should contemplate?"
























we want to make a series of bonsai with many different materials like soil, fungus, plastic, and vinyl, which we should contemplate in the Anthropocene.  






The first bonsai series we made on the Vancouver island is about Canadian human-made forestry and its homogeneity. Stefan’s experience working in the forestry industry taught me what is actually the process of reforestation. After ten years in the reforestation industry all around Canada from Haida to northern Quebec, he saw the consequence of reforesting clear-cuts, not as ecological preservation or repairing nature but instead to manipulate new forests massively. Like the bonsai tree, species of trees are selected, planted in restricted zones and carefully monitored. In these reforested clear-cuts other species naturally growing are managed and removed to create a homogenous tree farm. Spruce, pine and fir, are the three most commonly planted trees all over Canada. We will get these three trees from the local tree nursery and re-symbolize them as an essence of Canadian woods.







Spruce,
pine
and fir.











Mark
Echoes of distancelessness_ Part1
Various materials
size variable upon installation
2019












































Mark
Echoes of distancelessness_ Part 2
Various materials
size variable upon installation
2019
































Mark