press release
Wong Hoy Cheong
15 November–20 December 2002
This Autumn, the John Hansard Gallery presents recent works
by the most prominent Malaysian artist on the international
scene, Wong Hoy Cheong. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity
for the British public to give careful consideration to his
art practice and to the interrelationships between history,
politics, culture and ethnicity that his work explores. Cheong’s
use of a wide range of materials and media act as a ‘visual
vocabulary’ through which to make visible a number of
complex and controversial postcolonial discourses. In so doing,
Cheong addresses a number of questions about misrepresentation,
authenticity, authoritarianism, social fragmentation, human
migration, geographical displacement, diversity, hybridity and
the transformation of identity.
Born into the newly independent Malaysian nation in 1960, Wong
Hoy Cheong completed his higher education in the West before
returning to Malaysia to create his artworks. In relocating
his art practice to this native context, Cheong challenges the
convention that an artist’s practice may only mature within
a Western centre. The success of his challenge is perhaps best
illustrated by the extent to which his work is represented in
the national collections of, amongst other nations, Japan, Malaysia,
Singapore, Australia and the United States.
The pieces selected for this exhibition have been produced
between 1996 and 2002. They reflect the breadth of the artist’s
interests, the range of materials that he has used, and the
way in which his practice has matured – from drawings
on paper which resonate with memory and family histories, to
the installations and sculptural works that Cheong has constructed
from a wide range of materials, including, amongst others, the
debris of colonisation found in Malaysia and a number of natural
materials native to this part of Southeast Asia.
Organised by OVA (Organisation of Visual Arts), the exhibition
comes to Southampton from Bluecoats Gallery, Liverpool, as part
of a three date tour of Britain. The project also comprises
a residency at Gasworks, London, established to enable the artist
to experience the context of the country in which this exhibition
takes place and so that he may make a number of new works whilst
positioned on the British side of the post-colonial equation.
The project, which has received financial assistance from the
Arts Council of England’s National Touring Programme,
the Prince Claus Foundation and Visiting Arts, includes a publication
produced by OVA, priced at £9.95, available from the Gallery
Bookshop during the course of the exhibition.
