Blindspot Gallery will be taking part in Frieze London 2023, presenting works by Sin Wai Kin, Angela Su, Trevor Yeung, and Xiyadie, the first three of whom have been exhibited by Blindspot at the past editions of Frieze Focus. Their diverse practices cover a range of mediums including video, hair embroideries, object-based works, and papercuts. They reflect the gallery’s focus on diverse contemporary art practices by Asian artists with a global perspective, and its programme concerning social phenomena such as gender discourse and societal issues that continue to shape the art world.
This group presentation will include Turner Prize 2022 nominee Sin Wai Kin’s video work The Story Cycle (2022), commissioned by, and filmed in Somerset House London. The Story Cycle considers how cycles of listening, embodying, and storytelling construct our idea of human nature. It follows two clowns as they search for their place in unfolding narratives set in strange infrastructures, told by an unreliable storyteller. Displayed alongside The Story Cycle is Sin Wai Kin’s The One (2021). The film shows Sin deep in meditation, eyes shut, stationery, breathing. With the sun disk as a third eye, the outline of the body is relocated to the face, and the mouth stands in for every orifice, redefining and eroticising the limits of the body. There is no more division between self and world, mind and body, individual and context.
Angela Su represented Hong Kong at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. Su’s latest series of hair embroideries, Hush Little Baby, Don’t Say a Word (2023), draws inspiration from the song Strange Fruit immortalised through Billie Holiday — “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.” (Strange Fruit, written by Abel Meeropol, recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939). The song has been ominously labelled as the first “protest song”, the first milestone of the role music played in the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S in the 1950s to 1960s. The imagery in the hair embroideries depict fruits in mutation. They are organic objects in biomorphic forms blending vegetative species, insects, and human bodily organs. The images elicit haunting, free-associating, deeply intuitive sides of the psyche, and are sites of resistance against the injustices in our social system.
Su’s other hair embroidery series, Sewing together my split mind (2019-21), represents the sewing of body parts as gestures of protest, acts of rebellion, and the suppression of freedom of speech. The series alludes to the history of stitching body parts as performative acts of radical protests, for example, the lip sewing of detained asylum seekers in Manus Island (2014), and artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz (1989), as well as the vagina sewing of performance artist Kembra Pfhaler (1992). The sewn images are instructions of suture techniques, therein exists a tacit ambivalence between healing and harming.
Xiyadie is a self-taught traditional Chinese papercut artist who started creating works with homoerotic themes to tell his personal journey of transformation. His autobiographical papercuts reflect Chinese folk craftsmanship techniques, yet they transcend traditional forms and ideas, engaging topics of queer liberation and familial love which are both personal and universal. Growing up in the underdeveloped agrarian countryside of Shaanxi, he learnt the traditional art of papercut from his female relatives, and was married and fathered two children. Having kept his homosexuality solitary, while practising his craft in secrecy, he finally came out to his family and moved to the capital city of Beijing as a migrant worker. Xiyadie is the artist’s chosen name, denoting the resilient butterfly that soars and thrives despite the harsh environment of the Western Asian steppes of Siberia. This will be the first time that Xiyadie’s work is being exhibited in the UK. He recently had his inaugural institutional solo exhibition in New York, at the Drawing Center (2023).
Trevor Yeung will represent Hong Kong at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 and is shortlisted for the Sigg Prize 2023 (winner to be announced in 2024). Yeung uses botanic ecology, horticulture, aquarium system and installations as metaphors that reference the emancipation of everyday aspirations towards human relationships. Yeung’s Night Mushroom Colon series comprises electrical converters and mushroom night lights, giving out a stealthy bioluminescence that suggests a secretive realm. The cluster of unruly luminescent mushrooms inhibits unassuming and dark corners, they thrive in fecundity and reproduce through polyamorous converters and seductive colours. Yeung currently has a solo exhibition at Gasworks London (28 September – 17 December, 2023), marking his first institutional solo exhibition in the UK.