Exhibits,
Natalie Quan Yau Tso Sea-Skins 海皮
Opening: Wednesday 21st May, 6-9pm Dates: May 21 - June 28 2025
Through altered maps, teardrop beads, salt, Hong Kong seawater and the artists own sweat, Sea-Skins honours and memoralises the forgotten relationships between Hong Kongers and their coastlines to grieve and cultivate hope.
Sea-Skins refuses Hong Kong’s colonial narrative by excavating the buried histories between sea and land. These coastlines have been ideal conditions for salt-farming, leading also to colonial controls across 2000 years, beginning from the salt monopoly in 119BC, to Song Dynasty massacre of ‘illegal’ salt farmers, 19th Century British land reclamation and the current police state. On these battle fronts, salt-farming has become an embodied knowledge of resistance and a practice of mutual nourishment between the earliest inhabitants of Hong Kong and the sea. Sea-skins awakens the ghosts of these histories, and connects Tso to a long lineage of resistance from ancestral salt-farming to protesting. Centring salt in its natural and bodily forms, the sculptures and installations root Tso’s Hong Kong identity in mutual geological care to outlive this violence of colonisation, state control and capitalism.
Tso will be performing Sea-Ghost at the opening celebrations
This work was made on stolen land. Please consider paying settler rent to Mob and Palestinians in Gaza that the artist is directly in contact with via this link to details.
Natalie Quan Yau Tso’s practice re-imagines the lost embodied connection to place as a migrant-settler through sculptures, installations and performances. Her process involves being guided by her body as a meeting of place and histories, investigating bodily boundaries as political boundaries. She performs acts such as cleansing, eating and peeling that activate bodily dispersions. She then collects these bodily materials, including saliva, sweat and hair to form sculptures. The transparent, almost invisible, materials are a mask that both protects and erases her. She currently lives, works and dreams on unceded Gadigal, Wangal, Cammeraygal and Dharug country.