The Shade of Translucency: ART JAKARTA GARDENS 2023
Past exhibition
Overview
Over the past five years, Yim Yen Sum has been exploring the history of houses or buildings in her works. She is fascinated by shifting notions of the home/house or place/space across different historical narratives: under colonial influence, political contexts, natural disasters, and economic growth. These explorations are often filtered through an autobiographical lens, expressing her way ways of seeing and thinking through these shifting landscapes.
Yen Sum dedicates this exhibition to her childhood memories of nineties Kuala Lumpur, relooking histories of areas that were affected by the rapid development of the city. The holes in her fabric are the focus here: the act of looking - peeping or spying - challenges the sensation of visual pleasure, whilst representing the way public spaces create a power contestation between seeing and being seen in an urban environment. A key reference is her childhood memory of playing on the grounds of the now-demolished Razak Mansion, whose iconic holed walls allowed her classmate’s mother to “spy” on them. In Yen Sum’s nostalgic memory, the hole is a form of surveillance that is more visible, whilst the new surveillance systems of today have developed sophistically to find us in every dot and movement of our lives. The Shade of Translucency underlines this possibility for a subtle, thin border that could either connect us or divide us apart.
Yen Sum dedicates this exhibition to her childhood memories of nineties Kuala Lumpur, relooking histories of areas that were affected by the rapid development of the city. The holes in her fabric are the focus here: the act of looking - peeping or spying - challenges the sensation of visual pleasure, whilst representing the way public spaces create a power contestation between seeing and being seen in an urban environment. A key reference is her childhood memory of playing on the grounds of the now-demolished Razak Mansion, whose iconic holed walls allowed her classmate’s mother to “spy” on them. In Yen Sum’s nostalgic memory, the hole is a form of surveillance that is more visible, whilst the new surveillance systems of today have developed sophistically to find us in every dot and movement of our lives. The Shade of Translucency underlines this possibility for a subtle, thin border that could either connect us or divide us apart.
