Ceili Murphy talks to Yuk King Tan

Ceili Murphy: In your practice you explore ideas about cultural identity, global politics, trade, power and consumption - what is your focus for the project you are currently working on in Hong Kong?

Yuk King Tan: There are a few things I am working on at the moment, one is a continuation of a research project about China and Taiwan's ongoing political involvement or geo-political entanglement in the Pacific, and the other is a large installation for an exhibition in Hong Kong. Both are about how we consume roles, implicating different agendas about representation and status. The latest series is a group of photographs, which I will probably never exhibit, that frame very small constructions I have found or created within the city. Small urban interventions as sculptural sketches about modernism and space: I think of those works as a light amalgam of romantic 1970's in-situ works, suggesting the idea that 'journey's are the midwives of thought'. The other projects are so much more considered, requiring management of funds and time, so it's good to have a focus on works that require direct experience and a quicker experimental process just to have a counterpart.

Ceili Murphy: How much do you think your background being raised in New Zealand, born in Australia and of Chinese descent informs and drives your interest in these issues?

Yuk King Tan: It's the chicken or egg question. In Marcel Duchamp's 'Door, 11 Rue Larrey (1927)' the door between two doorways is the "paradoxical door", open and closed between bedroom/kitchen and bathroom. Sometimes I think about identity like that work - a multi-panelled illusion that may allow in an insight/entry to how people function and behave.What is common to most New Zealanders is that our multiple backgrounds makes one very aware of social relations and multiple facets of identity. Identity is contingent on collective and individual experience, what is prescribed or ascribed. I think New Zealand has been struggling with national identity for almost all of its history and is hyper-aware, from the Treaty and governmental social policy, about the fallacy of collective history. And that we have been challenging for while how much of our background is really 'by design' or 'by accident'. As a side-point certainly I certainly did not choose to be born in Australia but now that fact is a permanent fixture on every biography. So nationalism and ethnicity is something you cannot help but be highly literate and yet irreverent about. You are always institutionalised, economically or socially by a variety of different interactions but I believe that our own choices are as important as any external pressures or the fall-out of history. In this current time there are countless articles grappling with tidal ideas about globalisation, locality, or 'glocality' and so yet again it is valid to understand these powerful relationships about identification on a political, and personal, level.

Ceili Murphy: Could you please explain what the significance of the snowflake motif holds for you - I am thinking of the images you made by digitally duplicating newspaper photos and arranging them into snowflake patterns for a show at Sue Crockford Gallery [NZ] and for a poster at Artspace [NZ]?

Yuk King Tan: Snowflakes are not particularly a personal obsession and that's a hard admission! Order and disorder, entropy and closed systems are part of the theoretical basis in fractal patterns. Of course snowflake designs are attractive - they are highly ornate, complicated repeating structures conveying the multitude and the microcosm.

We are bombarded with a network of influential comment and imagery and I want to assert that one can infiltrate that system with a similar yet alien network. The snowflake pattern was another small meta-system like the ebb and flow pattern of how we report on current events, the crystals appeared like small islands within some complicated media coastline.

And then the 'Free New Zealand' exhibition at Artspace seemed a good fit for another publishing outlet: propagating a new media cycle. I also enjoyed how the flakes appeared like small islands within some complicated media coastline. Another dig about how connected we are as a community because history suggests, no matter what we believe about autonomy, that there is no such thing as an objective outsider.

Ceili Murphy: Do you view (or how do you view) your work acting as a critique of consumerism?

Yuk King Tan: As a maker of art products it's important to understand you are never an outsider to consumerism. The art industry is strongly engaged with the engine of the market - the desire for the idea and the value/currency of the object of that idea. If a sociologist studies the needs and wants of a society, than an economics is the study of how people get what they want or need. If I were more of a political activist than I would definitely agitate for some type of radical reform of economic strategies. But my greatest problem probably stems from being unsure about how art can be used as a straightforward political forum. If there's a critique of consumerism in my work than it's definitely soft-focus, I am really trying to understand market-forces, how those ideas truly affect the individual and what happens to society. I make work about very small parts of those issues, intersecting with quite personal ideas about the market. Those topics are so large that having a personal stake in an issue can ground and yet complicate a work. I am bored with art that is so personal and indulgent that it is irrelevant, or so didactic that it becomes a type of artistic imperialism (post-courant contemporary painting versus thumping political Northern European video art - to put my art opinion on the line). But growth, from tourism, western style capitalism or socialist deal making, has created an abundance of objects and in my last exhibition I collected a large amount of these vainglorious objects to create an installation piece.

Ceili Murphy: Your work is often deemed by critics and galleries to be double-edged, would you agree with this?

Yuk King Tan: A friend once mentioned that she thought some of my larger installations had a 'sick glamour' on their surfaces. In the works like 'Island Portrait', a photo and video where I staged a group photo of workers brought in from China to the Cook Islands, what is apparent is a sense of disjunction between the mainland construction workers and the tropical island. I was interested in the overlay of our fantasy of the exotic tropical local and then the ongoing realities of geopolitics and aid.

Physically, and perhaps it's obvious in the materiality of the installations that dribble wax or exude silky tassel, there is sometimes a spectacle that is undermined by the arrangement, title or background. I believe most of the works have a conceptual edge that the initial surfaces may refute. Most of the works tend to have a slightly morbid edge - reservations about this media age, curiosity about globalisation, the difficulty of iconoclasm. But I don't ever want to get into the realm of NZ gothic; I think that other people do that much better and as such I am really uninterested in pursuing that in my work. Even when people have classified some pieces as 'playful' I am unsure about that label, except that what is first present is really just a trip wire to some other avenue.

Ceili Murphy: Where do you think the initial power to captivate viewers' sits; in highly seductive visual products or in the conceptual inquiry the products undertake?

Yuk King Tan: First impressions are sensory and the conceptual should be engaged symbiotically in that package. It's a "field of resonances". I hope for my own work there is a psychological frission between the physical experience of a work and the conceptual inquiry. Often materialism, the objects and the process of craft, are the conceptual triggers. Or the actual production of the work inevitably informs the final piece and its good to keep those possibilities alive.

In my own process I find it problematic how fetishistic the forms are in their finish and construction. It's my own confusion that a lot of the 'work' is about things I enjoy and yet that leads to direct questions about how we live and why we do things. Shopping, handicraft, photography, small acts disturbing the peace...

Ceili Murphy: Your practice as an artist moves through a wide range of "sites": tutor, dealer-commercial gallery, biennales, public galleries, artist run spaces. Does your art cater to the different spaces you show in, with their different audiences, or is your process for initiating the work self-reflexive?

Yuk King Tan: An obvious series for various different exhibition sites, in terms of process, are the pyrotechnic installations/performances because inevitably what is 'created' is an escalating series of actions and results questioning what actually is the 'final artwork' or 'creative act' about responsibility, authorship and cultural significance. So in 'The Picturesque' the audience eventually exploded off thousands of fireworks glued onto the walls of the museum - the piece devolving from ornate images to ironically far more delicate patterns of burn marks/destruction on the walls and floor. Specifically probing the 'creative act' and the relationship between artist and participant especially the 'contracts' between the institution, artist and viewers. Ideas about responsibility, authorship and cultural significance are also valid in works like 'Sightseer' a series of photos taken by rockets in Germany, or interventions in museum spaces that work on the pedagogy of exhibiting our cultural artefacts.

Not all of my works are quite so directly related to the politics of the space and it's a deliberate choice that certain themes are related to concerns outside of the exhibition or education framework.

But, of course, the power relationships between different sites are interesting. I once heard a funny cynical analogy relating the artworld to racing. That the artworks were the race track, artists - the horses/dogs, dealers and curators - the jockeys, critics - the betting industry, the audience - the punters/television viewers, and institutions - as stadiums or management depending on how far you would go to position or elaborate on the theory. Would artist-run spaces then romantically be the underground events - cock-fights/insect races/basement affairs...?

Perhaps hypercritical analogies that artists often create to make sense of politics are good at highlighting just how objects or ideas work differently for different audiences.