1.1 Precious Treasures - Incinerator Art Space

Transcript

Hey, this is Hung Up, coming to you from Sydney. Each week we’re going to go to a gallery and talk about what we see.

When we talk about art it feels like there’s too much emphasis on getting it. It’s more fun to just walk up to what you like and see what happens. This week we’re at Incinerator Art Space in Willoughby for Precious Treasures. The show runs until the 28th of Feb. Follow us at hungup.au on Instagram so you can see the pictures from this show.

Looks like it’s just a cafe. It does look like it’s just a cafe. Hi, how’s it going? We’re just looking for art cafe. Oh, it’s downstairs. Oh, okay. Okay, thanks. So we’re looking at one of the back walls of the gallery here and there’s this work by Amy Fu which is six panels that are all backed with mirrors.

And there’s a kind of, it’s like a plexiglass like cover or front panel that’s totally transparent. And behind it, the main thing, the first thing you spot is that there’s what looks to me like six of the sort of fundamental strokes that go into a character.

And it invokes Link to me about writing and the history of writing and what they call stroke order. Dotted on the back of the mirrors are these, do you know what, did you ever play Pokemon? Pokemon cards? Yeah, I’ve had, I’ve got a couple.

Okay, so like there was this thing, I don’t know if this is a thing, but they had these little like kind of jelly colored little glass stones that were like part of your fucking energy supply or something. That’s the kind of like visual texture of these stickers that are on the mirrors. So on each of the six mirrors, we have this like progression from ancient Chinese characters, which were very pictographic, I understand.

They actually came from this like picture, really representative writing style. And then as you move along, it’s, it becomes more and more formalized. And then it gets to this point where it’s like the type of handwriting you would see on an order pad, like, you know, two steamed dumplings and a fucking fried rice, you know.

And then on the final one, the stickers have become digitized. They’re all ones and zeros. They’re like plus and minus divide. They’ve like got brackets and, you know, stuff like that. So there’s this some cool thing about, you know, this kind of like arc of like progression in some kind of like language technology.

You definitely feel a sense of history. The play of like, yeah, writing and the components of writing and fishing line, just these two fundamental parts of, you know, humanity, like, we got something to write and we got something to like catch food with. Yeah, it’s addressing this like really, like universal human stuff.

And then the signs to the, sorry, the neon strokes, we’ll call them, to me, are this kind of like new thing of like advertising and commerce. Like these are commercial and like, they’re kind of like in the world of art, at least from like my kind of outsidery perspective.

They’re like, they’re like cheap materials. You know, it’s like a grease pencil, it’s fishing twine, little transparent stickers, and maybe the neon tubes might have been the most expensive part. She’s demonstrated this like really beautiful mastery of the materials in that they’re able to convey so much.

And there’s really not that much material. I mean, each of these panels, what do you think it weighs like a kilogram or two kilograms? They’re not, they’re not cumbersome. Like, you know, they don’t look like they were hard to install or anything. Yeah. And not only that, they’re not belabored in that they have this really powerful kind of conceptual art effect.

It’s kind of that thing of like, I’ll give you a long article because I don’t have time to write a short one. But this is the short article. Like there’s not that much going on. I was kind of saying like, oh, you could break it down into six or seven elements. But, you know, restricting yourself just to those elements, like, you know, not just the materials, but also like the way they’re laid out.

I mean, these are all made of the same stuff. Like every panel is made of the same stuff. But we’re like telling and expressing and evoking, you know, whole different worlds. It’s just to me, yeah, it feels like a mastery. And it’s so difficult to make cheap objects.

It’s so hard to make them powerful because, you know, you’re still just reading them as the objects that they are. They don’t have the kind of pedigree of oil or like an expensive bit of canvas. That’s true. Yeah, we’re the cheap object is kind of always at a disadvantage in like our eyes. And we kind of it sort of has to fight for its place.

I think on this kind of reflex level, you know, we see like a really like what’s the word I’m looking for? Like a sort of luscious, like impressionist painter type piece. And the oil on that canvas alone may have cost 100 bucks, you know, just for like a small little, you know, hand sized canvas.

Maybe I don’t know, you know, and they just they look expensive and they are expensive. And they came from these places of extreme sort of fine wealth. But this stuff is all available by the square meter, you know, by the meter. All this twine, you can buy 100 meters for two bucks. You know, the stickers cost nothing. The plexiglass is very cheap.

Yeah, it’s cool. It’s really it’s it’s out. It’s sort of outperforming its like material destiny. Yeah, there’s this kind of like multi dimensional thing going on with this work that we love so much. Oh, we love it so much. All right, let’s move along.

We were talking about the Amy Fu mirrored works and then these are on the adjacent wall, the Yang Shifa stuff. They’re both series of six and they’re just something like purely formally about like a series that speaks to like history and progression. And then from like a viewer’s perspective, the way it kind of like eases you into a way of seeing.

You’re like, I’ve seen that one over there and now I kind of see the next one. Yeah. There’s this really kind of interesting way that you can kind of dance back and forth through like the time and the images. That’s so true. Yeah. There’s this really beautiful like harmony with this work. There’s like six beautifully spaced out and very rhythmic patterns. It’s like the same coin.

Well, the same shape of coin and the same like character space in the top, you know, the same makers mark stamps. Yang Shifa has like really conveyed the feeling of like rust and oxidization on these ancient, ancient coins. Like, so they had currency that was like this. It was like the first metal currency and it had holes in the middle of it.

But to me, these are like these big, like fat, juicy doughnuts. They’re so juicy to look at. I like in this one. So it’s like another six panel series. It all kind of has like in its, what it’s comprised of kind of feels ancient and almost classic. But then in one of the coins, there’s like this heart, heart rate monitor, kind of like line, like the spikes.

And then it kind of terminates in like a little arrow point. Yeah. I love this ghostly face. It actually made me take my glasses off so that I can see it a bit closer. It almost looks like watercolor erosion. And like, we’ve got like dripping this kind of like that ghostly green kind of moss.

Yeah. Patina that’s like rendered above the coins. It’s kind of dripping down the canvas. But then they’re also really nicely tied together by this like formal composition that like rectangular hole in the center. And then this kind of like rectangular crown insignia at the top. Okay, let’s get a couple more picks.

It’s called New Year Rot, which I kind of like. Yeah. This like sense of rotting. Yeah. And then we have these like, what are they? They’re glittery and glistening. Yeah. Like it’s kind of interesting the way this work is framed. It’s kind of taking up the most space. It is hanging, but it’s the kind of, you can’t help but notice it. Uh, but a lot like there’s, uh, all the rest of the work that kind of more, what would you call that?

It’s all up against the wall. Not only are they up against the wall, but I’m just thinking about like the colors of these and these. They’re more, much more like muted and toned down, almost like washed out. Yeah. The other works are very gentle colors, like natural and kind of, um, sort of little bright spots of color. Um, but these are like, um, they look like tech that you can get in like the coolest nail salons.

They’re, they’re, um, they’re like these, these new age, like kind of chemical colors that they’re very sticky to the eye and they’re like fun to look at. They’re like, they look like they’re dripping, right? They look like they’re totally gooey dripping with stuff. Yeah. Check it out. They’ve got a frosted glass ceiling to the cafe. You can see the workers stepping around.

We would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this episode was recorded and pay our respects to their elders past and present. We extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today.

You can find us on Instagram at hungup.au. Next week, we’re in Concord West for the Festival of Lace. Thanks for listening. Bye.

Show notes

This is Hung Up from Sydney, recorded live on location by Aiden Loughlin and Matt Sitas. Each week we go to a gallery and talk about what we see. This week we’re at Incinerator Art Space in Willoughby for precious treasures. The show runs until the 28th of Feb. When we talk about art, it feels like there’s too much emphasis on “getting it”. But we think that it’s more fun to just walk up to what you like the look of and see what happens. Follow us on Instagram so you can see the works that we talk about in this show  www.instagram.com/hungup.au