University of Dundee

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

• 
• 

Hello reader,  

Be you dedicated blogoree since day one, or just visiting to find out more about my art practice; 

mostly

THANK YOU =>>>> for blogging on with me

The degree show boot was as expected; leathery and steel capped, so university days already seem like a distant surreal memory, erasing themselves like Aha’s ‘Take On Me’.  I’ve got my professional hat at the ready; I need to.  Luckily always this and not dungarees with paint on.  Phew.

I hope that this unravelling online account of my practice over the past month has given you a refreshing insight into my art passions, capabilities and aspirations. I have sought to provide an honest slice of my art dreams-dashes and day-to-day jouissance.  I can safely surmise that it’s been quite a rollercoaster and I am only at Chesington; Alton Towers still to come.

Here’s to a future of :

quality art for me and you that makes me relish that sublime moment despite any stressful, crap, penniless times to come.  I hope I can carry on making because I don’t know how not to now. That’s also thanks to Dundee Uni: the tutors, technicians, office secretaries and security… It was all just right for me.  It helped me get here, and that’s not too bad. 

HOPE

I hope people continue to smile or raise their eyebrows when they look at my work.  That’s the ultimate because I can hear their cogs working, when they stand, observing, reach out to touch, or return with a friend, that’s what makes me think; artist almost? No not artist, more, a 3D renderer of Bill Bryson’s inner workings.  Ok, an artist.

Thanks to the entire A-N team, from editorial to IT to subscription, you are indeed a genuinely sound bunch who inspire art and are art inspired.  You care to nurture the talent and it’s been bloborific: theraupeutic, routine to the art madness, challenging and fulfilling; a site to trace what I have done this year and how. If you ever get the invitation to blog here, reach. Hopefully Happy Birthday 25 A-N will have me for an update in the future…

The Blobs take their bow for now;

All the best, Blobbing off,

Kai-Oi Jay Yung
(interdisciplinary artist)

>>>>Let’s make good art for she he you me 

Spurrrrghh hehu huh. Get off, not the Oscarts you know.  Blob head.

“Jay Yung’s weirdly beautiful anthropomorphic sculptures somehow combine cellular imagery with an ice cream and fairy-cake aesthetic” Moira Jeffrey, The Herald, 26 May 2006

“Waste is turned into an art form… Jay Yung’s interactive head turning exhibition embraces rubbish as an art form” Chester Chronicle, 16 November 2005

“A cacophony of exuberant work…its starting point the tension between two identities manifests itself as… order versus chaos or beauty versus ugliness” Dundee University, May 2006

“Get your blobs out” Nuts, hopefully never

Got

First Class Honours, BA (Hons) Fine Art, University of Dundee 2006
BA (Hons) French Language and Literature, Sheffield University, 1999, 2:1

Prizes/Awards 2005-6

The William Armstrong Davidson Prize
Alan Woods Memorial Prize
Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, Professional Artist Development Scheme

Shortlisted

They Had Four Years 2007, Generator Projects, Dundee
The Wimberley Medal     

Tell Me
[email protected]
http://www.chinese-arts-centre.org/mpn/story.php?sid=745

The Future 2006:  Exhibitions/Activity

June:
A-N
On the Front Cover: ‘Future Forecast’ 2006

Friday 23 June
The Wormhole Salon III, The Whitechapel Gallery, East London
7-11pm
http://www.whitechapel.org/content.php?page_id=2592
http://www.newtoy.org/MENU6.swf

30 June – 1 July
NAN High Tides and Low Lights

July

Blurring The Neatline, The Embassy Galleries, Edinburgh17 June – 16 July
14 July: Trampoline video event, Live projections from a roaming vehicle: sites including Edinburgh castle, Cowgate Bridge, Museum of Scotland
http://www.blurringtheneatline.org/index.htm

August

Cove Park Springboard Residency, Scotland, invitation courtesy artist/tutor Graham Fagen
http://www.covepark.org/AboutUs.htm

September

Video Projections: The Old Blue Last, London, in conjunction with Vice Magazine, 2006

Thank You:

Graham Fagen, http://www.grahamfagen.com/
Matthew Dalziel http://www.dalzielscullion.com/
Derrick Guild http://www.artnet.com/artist/7540/derrick-guild.html
Clive Gillman, Dundee Contemporary Arts, http://www.thecourier.co.uk/output/2005/01/27/newsstory6757663t0.asp
Phong Van Dam, Alan Greigg
Eddie Summerton (for letting me on the course)
Jenny Brownrigg, Dundee Uni, http://www.exhibitions.dundee.ac.uk/
>>>>Debbie Chan: fairyartmother: here’s to all to come
http://www.chinese-arts-centre.org/mpn/index.php

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Dearest Blog 11,

The Black Period- Monday 5 to Sunday 11 June only

Hello there. Well?

Starting to get my breath back, following a month of factor ten whirlwind dervishness, intensified by my rental contract ending at the same time.

So, here I am back in the North West.

Unfortunately, it did not start off too great. Not because I am touching the void. Hel, no! That’s yet to smoulder.

The combination of bird poo and 888 did not foretell cookie fortune, much the opposite. En route from Dundee to Manchester, my rucksack was stolen.

Of course, it contained my two books filled with three years of paintings and sketches- they marked the progression of my cell aesthetic into schismic doodle, this plus all documentation of degree show ( 8 rolls of slides and film) not to mention £450 Minolta camera (Hong Kong), passport and all credit cards etc plus ipod for good measure.

The remaining five bags safely returned with me. They contain collage material- i.e old receipts, nik naks found in the street, bits of wood and general sCrap.

Typical.

I am not really sure how to handle this loss, I am feeling upset and angry, primarily because such original paintings are useless to the thieves, and will probably end up in the bin nowhere nothank between Dundee and Manchester. Broxden roundabout?

The irony of it all. Did the Chapmans feel this need to lament on Momart crisis? Something signals no. Probably the team reproducing copies of Hell for an oncoming show.

Moreover, this loss is compounded by a certain ‘cry wolf homework syndrome’.

Documentation is the currency for installation and now I ma definitely skint. I have a soupcon that "Jay cannot provide evidence of her previous show or drawing/painting development since her art work was stolen en route Megabus by the masked art highwayman" will be shunned by future exhibitors.

The feeling of losing art: something so precious and personal is grieving process which feels almost wrong. It’s irreplaceable material stuff but  akin to the loss of a loved one. You feel almost ashamed that you harbour such emotion- Greek myth reveals adulation of one’s own art work fates being poked in eyes by a big sparrow then turned into bat with no wings over 3000 years. Horror war.

Doom and gloom.

Wabbit: [rustle rustle] Hang on. Everything’s dispensable, you really shouldn’t get precious, author’s dead, long live post-modern bin bag.

Hurrah atta spirit!!! Blobs say Ho!!!!!

Jay: Wabbit get back into your bubble wrap. Oh pants ye, I am auratic and my drawings transcended all humanity into the cosmos. Past Go, over Sun Ra and into oblivion.

Wabbit: oh dear… splobble

Jay: See ya in the next and almost final blog. I have three days to wallow in sulk.

Big Blog ten

This week, I feel like my days have been groundhogged. My inner self has been spirited away and I am pretty much a floating head.

The past:

Friday night:

4:30pm- Kemikal, beatboxer fails to show either himself or amplifier system. (necessary for other two acts). Do not stress and deal with. Source from Derek Lodge, half of performing duo. Cab it get it

5:00pm- Derek forgets guitar, cab it get it. Set up baby drum kit and rehearsal with new amp

5:30pm: put unsensible shoes on in toilet, find bottle opener

6pm: Friends arrive

6:30: guests arrive- space is completely grid locked. Drink wine, look at people looking

Derek Lodge and Michael Mallette perform: wigs, comedy lyrics, drumming, guitaring; fascination

8:00 Michael Jackson, Glasgow/France, rocks my show, transforms chinstroking well-behaved into boisterous, cheering rabble; truly quality, especially slo-mo falling and wolf swinging. Kinetically erupts in small confines of performance ‘stage’ without damaging blobs/kicking anyone in face. His movement+sonic awesome against backdrop of Trampoline, projected large scale.

11pm+ Raining. Show friends Dundee in rain. Happy

Saturday, hungover, pack heavy stuff. Friends transport stuff north-west England- vehicle toppling over. Dad cannot make it : transport has botched up from England. Shout at transport company; no use. Dad will not see show. Sad.

Sister arrives from Amsterdam. Chinese meal. Full.

Sunday, show show to sister, pack.

Sunday Evening: pack, sister leaves, disturbed sleep; must leave flat soon

Monday, invigilate, weird. Busy. Sat in space. 9-8:30pm. People see only your art. Competition grows- painters- who has most red dots stickers? Personal reality: blobs will never seek mantelpiece glory

Tuesday: pack, leave flat. Invigilate. Society of Scottish Artists interest

Wednesday: Stay at friends, pidgeon poos on arm whilst riding bike to physio. 888. Uni buys two doodles for collection. Give talk to seven suited men from Dundee Guilds Association. Approached with offer to create artists books for a six part event in well known bookshop; non funded.

10:00pm Comforted by Big Brother wrong reality, throw objects + swear more than turrettes bloke at contestants. (Beg your pardon officer.) Missing own home

Thursday: Acupuncture at hospital 8:30am.

10:00am Chinese Arts Centre PAD Scheme co-ordinator flys up from Manchester to visit my show. Spend day with her. Lunch treat at DCA, discussing mentor scheme, opportunities for me, my future and tailor made plan of action. Is fairy artmother and has semi-magiked black art hole away. Lovely day.

18:52. Typing this. Eyes closing.

10:30pm Friend begins National Express journey from Brighton. 11 hours. Is very good friend. Will arrive 9:30 Friday. Will show show and hug Scotland till Sunday evening.

Very tired. Must sleep. Cannot syntax, am wrinkly. Computer suit door broken- cannot access images for this page. Will add images when door unbroken. Cannot bear thought of invigilation space now, legs must carry to friend’s home. Must stop typing. Goodnight 7:23pm. Thought enters: tomorrow last day of term, next week deinstalling, goodbye blobs, Dundee Uni etc. Big boot, tender backside arrive. Will not deal now, must fail to register.

Hope to refuel,—————————– —————————– Dream: time do nothing me soonish please thanks . speak next time

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Heelo.

I am Wabbit and I’d like to express my regrets that Jay can’t join you today.  She asked me to apologise for her neglect of you blogerees this past week.  Things have just been a little busy for her and she hasn’t had the chance to qwertyuiop catch up.

You see, since beginning of the assessments last Wednesday, she has been putting her belongings into little boxes in preparation to move out of her current abode. She has also been lying down with 15 needles stuck into her ankle and back. The physio says that Trampoline really catapulted this mechanical nerve failure, but she will not need to construct a small walking frame with go faster stripes just yet; the “alternative therapy” is working.  He can tell by the fact that the area surrounding the needles are going pink.  Hew hew, that will be the gushing blood sir, ready to erupt.    

Excuse my glitcheroids, I am afterall a splaty plaster blob.  Do you think my smooth sleek ball is too polished? Sometimes I wish I were less tall and more like Utter! Nob, he has such a nice doodle atop of his flathead. 

Anyway, Jay is smiling a lot today since she is making last minute preparations for this evening.  It’s degree show opening of course and she needs to make sure the guests all feel welcomed and cared for.  That is why there is much bottled and tinned liquid arriving in boxes and also why she is making sure the performers (beat box, dance and lyrical ruse) are all on form.  Moreover, she’s looking forward to greeting her close ones that are travelling from afar over the next week to discover me and my clan, and to absorb some of the noisy moving stuff going on in her space. 

Anyway, I must go now and shuffle into my position.  Can’t be caught out of place now… must also orchestrate Hoodie, his hood keeps sliding down, and as for Ftumptch! Stop fidgeting!!!

P.s Jay says that she will have more time to blog you next week for sure.  Oh, pssst, she found out yesterday she got a first class honours.  Me oh my, must have been me, yes, look at how delicious I be. 

The show mush go on. More family pics next time

• 
• 
• 
• 
•