Love Pool
2023
Peres Project, Berlin, Germany
A network of neon-lit swimming pools serves as the backdrop to Mak2’s Love Pool. In the triptychs that make up the bulk of the exhibition lovers sit and stand, pixelated at the poolside. Some stare off into space, seemingly disillusioned with the environment. An absurd humor underpins these reflections of modern domesticity and romantic love. The rooms and figures appear interchangeable, forming a complex of representations analogous to the digital terrain of dating apps, places that purport to be points of intimacy but often leave their users wanting. Through skylights and windows the Hong Kong skyline peers into the space, a constant reminder of the work’s underlying motivation: to find a home for artistic expression in a crowded city.
Palace of Love
2023
Tao Art, Taiwan, Taipei
Marking Mak2’s first solo exhibition in Taipei, ‘Palace of Love’ is a continuum of the artist’s iconic “Home Sweet Home” series, which explores the fine line between reality and imaginary through her sense of humour.
Transforming the life simulation video game into a love reality show, Mak2 stages her new series within a digital environment with luxurious Baroque characteristics that resemble royal residence. The ostentatiously flamboyant imagery hints at the growing presence of social consumerism, in which emotional labor in a relationship is romanticized in the attempt to create a fantasy that fills one’s void.
Mirage Reality
2021 – 2022
K11 Shanghai, China
House of Fortune
2021
DE SARTHE, Hong Kong, China
The Principle of Hope
16 Oct 2021 – 27 Feb 2022
Inside-Out Art Museum
Beijing, China
Mak 2’s works are currently on display in a group exhibition named “The Principle of Hope” in the Inside-Out Museum in Beijing. Through showcasing the practices of Chinese and international artists/cultural creators, the exhibition urges the audience to regard the future as a space full of potential and calls for active individuals to face the present with courage and to look forward to what the future holds for them.
How Do We Begin?
30 May – 13 Sep 2020
Mak Ying Tung 2’s works are exhibited in the 1st Edition X Museum Triennial titled How Do We Begin?.
Her works are also on view on their new platform “X Virtual Museum”, which was introduced in response to the Covid-19 crisis.
Mak Ying Tung 2 with her artist collective “Come Inside” is participating in a group show “Hot Flows: Pearl River Delta Arts Retrospective” in Macau. The exhibition revolves around Pearl River Delta’s meteoric progress of urbanization and its cultural phenomena developed in a considerable dualism.
Whatever Works, Whatever It Takes
2019
Goethe Institut, Beijing, China
In Out of Body Experience (2018), Mak Ying Tung ridicules cyberspace with its instant, with its low-end 5-RMB order through Taobao, the world’s largest e-commerce platform, ridiculing all the high-performance “magic” Communication across all physical distances attributes an equalizing, globalizing power. By sending her mind to Los Angeles, the artist is tampering with the irresolvable promise of global mobility: thanks to this magic, she rhetorically frees herself from the claim of the art world to be constantly present around the world.
Home Sweet Home
2018 – 2019
DE SARTHE, Hong Kong, China
In Home Sweet Home, Mak Ying Tung 2 examines the ways in which simulation is applied in postmodern escapism. In light of rising costs and growing responsibilities, humanity has adapted to face the escalating hardships of being. In lieu of futile negotiations, we settle for satisfying our needs through fabricated substitutes. Yet, to what extent can simulated replacements compensate the void of actuality? In an unrelenting world, does subsisting on hyperreality diminish our existence as living beings? In a city where these questions are common place, how do we cope?
The Anything Machine
2018
DE SARTHE, Beijing, China
The exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation in Beijing, as well as her first solo show with the gallery. Five bodies of work including new installations will be showcased. Mak Ying Tung 2’s work contemplates the properties of everyday objects and materials.
How is art changing in the digital era? Technology has provided new tools for the production, distribution and reception of art while also enabling rapid advancements in global trade and information exchange. Described as a “network” or a “cloud”, the infrastructure that facilitates this digital ecosystem is often assumed to exist as a universal system unencumbered by territory, language, law or national culture. Yet, very different forms of the internet have developed throughout the world, conditioning different social behaviors, economies and modes of thought. These variations are perhaps most evident when comparing the use of the internet in China and in the West, which reflect broader competing political and economic systems. How might these different technological environments express themselves in the contemporary art being made “locally”?
Bringing together a selection of artists from China and the West, this exhibition inquires the distinctions between the two. The digital space recurs as a utopian world, modeling alternative landscapes in virtual, augmented and analog forms. Certain works engage the cultural aspirations both encouraged and limited by the Chinese digital ecosystem, alongside its permeability to Western content. Painters propose new abstract spaces that combine historical Chinese and Western vocabularies with contemporary pictorial schematic devices. Surveillance technologies mingles with apps and devices that invite participation. Real geographies are set against technological representations and imaginary terrains, evoking the challenges in facing the liberal ideals of globalization in an age of nationalist retrenchment. The exhibition is complemented by a group of works from the Adrian Cheng Collection selected by K11 Art Foundation that offer several perspectives of moving and photographic images made in China, extending from the recent pre-internet era through to the “post-internet” condition of the present.
Paticipating artists: Darren Bader, Trisha Baga, Cao Fei, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Aleksandra Domanović, Gregory Edwards, Li Ming, Liang Wei, Lin Ke, Mak Ying Tung 2, Miao Ying, Jon Rafman, Martine Syms, Wang Xin.
CAFAM-Future
23 May – 5 July 2015
K11 Art Mall, Hong Kong, China
18 years on from Hong Kong’s reunification with China and under “One Country, Two Systems”, the sense of dissociation and distance between the Special Administrative Region and the Mainland continues to increase. The CAFAM Future exhibition series seeks to investigate the cultural production of China in its entirety, including the regions of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Addressing continued progressions in China, the exhibition documents the contemporary art scene of the nation. One that is moving towards a dominating curatorial course, and the effects this has for art makers.
The exhibition was originally shown in Beijing in January 2015, in its second reiteration to be launched in Hong Kong, CAFAM Future responds to the specificities of location, pursuing an exploration of the cultural differences that lie between the city and the Mainland. Of the 95 artists’ works shown in Beijing, the pieces by 33 artists were exhibited in Hong Kong, in pursuance to the directions of leading Chinese institutions.
Themed around OBSERVER – CREATOR, CAFAM Future features the works of an emerging generation of artists and the development of new art forms.
Produced in a breadth of mediums including; painting, installation, video, mixed media and more, the interdisplinary practices involve critical themes such as lighting, religion and philosophy. Each youthful artistic voice intensifies and reveals the profundity of culture in China.