If You Are Struggling, You Must Be Happy :)

Min Wong

Opening 04.10.18 6-8pm
Artist Talks 27.11.18 6-7pm

This installation investigates the spectacle associated with US cults from the 1960’s and 70’s and aims to reflect the paradoxical search for spiritual collectivism, human failure and future possibilities. Via the context of contemporary sculpture, I will further my investigation of visual culture associated with self care movements by examining tropes of utopia in contemporary life and art. By looking back to investigate the utopian elements of previous eras, we can perhaps reimagine modeling alternative worlds as intimations of possibility. By exploring utopian themes through sculpture, I examine the failures and the desire to repair the failed and build the new, reflecting this ambivalence and contributing to the possibilities for shaping the futures. The work acts as a playful platform to refer to the how American West Coast counterculture and its utopian aspirations, relate to the present.

In many ways I have co-opted my practice of Bikram yoga, and its philosophy of self-care, as a methodology for art making. The artefacts use repurposed yoga apparatus’ such as a rollers cast into bronze refering to fetish charged with both attraction and taboo. These sculptures seek to embody the complexities of modern spirituality through the appropriation of esoteric practices, the slippage of guru and deity, and the relationship of guru and disciple within methods of devotional practices. In some ways the latter might reflect the relationship between artist and the viewer. By using heterogeneous and repurposed material from the culture of the hippie era, and the current Yoga movement, I will present a physical space for the viewer to experience the 60s and 70s new wave counterculture as a simulacrum of lost hope, illusory dreams and shattered utopias.