Sea-Skins 海皮
Natalie Quan Yau Tso
17 May - 11 June 2024Natalie Quan Yau Tso, All of this used to be Sea, 31x47cm, resin, map from 1998, teardrop beads, jumprings and contact paper, 2024.
Sea-Skins refuses and overwrites Hong Kong’s colonial narrative by tracing the places where sea meets land. These coastlines and borders have been artificially altered—dumping soil onto seas, used as bargaining pieces, neglected when inconvenient and heavily surveilled by land colonisers (british and chinese). Seasalt is a gift between sea and land for Hong Kongers.
Natalie Quan Yau Tso draws upon the philosophies, practices and political histories of salt-farming that have been performed on Hong Kong coastlines for 2000 years to make new sculptures. She excavates in the ways that land colonisers have oppressed the sea through performance scores, teardrop pearls, incised maps, the salt of Hong Kong seawater, and her own sweat. Tso’s flesh becomes the Hong Kong sea, flooding to remake the porous land boundaries that imperialism and colonialism have imposed.
This show has been made amidst the passing of Article 23 and the ongoing Palestinian genocide. It hopes to encourage viewers to keep evolving forms of resistance.
“My deep love and resistance for Hong Kong has leaned greatly on the strengths and hopes of Palestinian and Indigenous resistance worldwide. From the river to the sea, always was always will be.”
Outer Space Main Gallery
Corner of Brunswick St & Berwick St,
420 Brunswick Street, Judith Wright Arts Centre,
Fortitude Valley, QLD 4006
Opening
6pm–9pm
Friday 17 May 2024
Free entry, all welcome
Exhibition Text
Written by Louisa Lim
Natalie Quan Yau Tso, Sea-turned-rocks, dimensions variable, 2024
Image: Natalie Quan Yau Tso, Photo: Anna Kucera
Natalie Quan Yau Tso’s practice seeks to urgently place, archive and remember Hong Kong to survive their erasure. She investigates bodily boundaries as political boundaries through sculptures, installations and performances. She is guided by the layers of her body as a meeting of place and histories, performing acts to activate bodily dispersions. She then collects these materials, including saliva, sweat, hair and skin to form sculptures. She is invested in transparent, almost invisible, materials as a mask that both protects and erases her in the post-colonial contexts of Australia and Hong Kong.
She has performed and exhibited nationally, including Performance Space, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Arts, Carriageworks and the Art Gallery of NSW. She currently works and lives across Gadigal, Wangal and Cammeraygal country.
The opening of this exhibition is supported by Half Moon Wine Store & Felons Brewing.