Gallery EXIT is pleased to present Almost Empty, Mak Ying Tung first solo exhibition with the gallery.
A deliberate emptiness sits at the heart of Mak Ying Tung’s Almost Empty – the exhibition revolves around a specific absence both corporeal and conceptual, dualistically exposing the material world within the dichotomy of the real and the unreal.
Intimating the symbolic, metaphorical, material and generative qualities of balloons, pumps and tubes, the works features in Almost Empty are altered in their form and function but meanwhile insisted to perform strange and bizarre tasks. Elaborately rich in sexual undertones, fragility and humor, the conceptually driven, performative sculptures and installations “nearly always reference or confront you with the figurative: its trace, its loss, its needs, its commercialism, its elimination.”[1]
The works of Mak Ying Tung employ the internet-driven way of thinking from her generation. The artist conceives, appropriates and manipulates ideas, concept and their material-presentation with the same immediacy as color correction or image filter on Photoshop. There is an evident articulation of the visual finishing of her artworks on a premeditated and deliberate level. Incorporating the existing pool of attention-grabbing images disseminated online, these works sublimate sophisticated issues into accessible sets of symbols exploring spaces and possibilities provided by the properties of contemporary concerns.
Mak Ying Tung (b.1989) is educated in School of Creative Media of City University of Hong Kong. Her practice combines installation, performance and illustration, frequently dealing with the de-contextualization of everyday objects. Interested in discovering something unusual in the minutiae of life, Mak makes use of domestic objects and transfigures them into objects of eccentricity and anomalies.
[1]Quinn Latimer on the works of Pamela Rosenkranz, Frieze Magazine, Issue 1, 2011
