2007 update
“This is all fruit and sex.”
Scrawling page one of my degree show comments book, these letters evoke strange detachment from an intensive three years exploring fine art at Dundee. Eleven months post-graduation have hazily disappeared in new projects, proposal writing, and budget calculating. Highlight exhibiting includes The Whitechapel Gallery, a focus documentary on my practice for Channel M, a commissioned project crossing theatre-video, and new installations for the Liverpool Biennial. I held my first solo show at Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, sold pieces at Scope, New York and plunged into live art and review writing for January’s a-n Magazine. It’s necessary to be fluid and adapt my practice since art globe is slippery with shifting parameters. No number of lectures or canvas stretching could prepare for market dynamics. I’ve encountered self-interested commercial spaces, press hungry curators overlooking the point, and trying artist verbose. Learning to drive art career can be hazardous, tiring. Gravitational core is my own personal and professional values, alongside nurturing relations with fellow artists, individual curators and residency directors I respect/trust. Guidance from my Professional Artists Development scheme, support from bodies/networks and experience of others prove invaluable.
Geographically, I am back to beginning; Liverpool’s exciting flux and open artist community facilitates the right climate to develop. Paradoxically home yet spirographing wide, I’ve just returned from an EU supported Munich residency, practicing alongside five artists from Peru to Marseille. I’ve also just been Arts Council England stamped for a South East Asia-Americas project of my own. That’s not to say I am financially secure or hold a permanent studio space. Importantly, I have forged strong collaborative friendships; such connection, scintillating ideas invites all possibilities. Working hard to generate new work/spaces is ultimate pleasure; that I may trigger exchange with a wider audience enforced by the moment between self-material; video, performance, paint…! I am busy looking ahead, elbow grind ushered by compulsion for different ways of making. Up next, a short Berlin residency, then managing my funding for a large-scale project celebrating Capital of Culture 2008.
Furthermore, my new role as gallery educator, Tate Liverpool, can but inform my practice. I enjoy this relationship with art; it beguilingly continues to morph, multifaceted. Fundamental is extending art context into the real and capacity to assess my experiences. Art blossoms my concept with cultures, people, forms and political voices. Emerging as a professional artist is irrefutably challenging, but following my instinct, I should be ok.
Kai-Oi Jay Yung, interdisciplinary artist, graduated from the University of Dundee in 2006.
www.myspace.com/kaioi
