The Elements

While sifting through the rich work of the Contemporary Art Practice (CAP) MA, my selection was guided by artists exploring the elemental in its broadest sense.

Joy Chia-Yu Yeh draws from Taiwanese folklore and Chinese ‘WuXing’ philosophy, to reinterpret the element gold (‘Jin’) and its relationship with modern society. Rieko Whitfield’s tentacular practice decentres Western capitalist individualism, using myth through song and storytelling. This embodied speculation also manifests in Catalina Correa's visual essay, in which the Patagonian landscape unearths intergenerational stories. Lulu Wang, meanwhile, engages with the Chinese cosmology of Yin Yang: her work ‘Yin-mian’ - meaning silver face - is an experimental performance exploring a visual expression of non-human and human emotions. Through Luis Tapia’s ‘Myths of Masters’ video tour, we time travel into historical painting to challenge the narrative hegemony that shapes our cultural subconscious, while River Cao performs an elegy in which loss and grief are methods to explore the power of water, which in the 1998 Yangtze River disaster destroyed his hometown in Southern China. Shinhoo Yhi’s ‘body filming’ dissects the camera’s capacity to ‘preserve and kill’ the liveness of bodyminds and Muzi’s ‘bondage graffiti’ rebalances the dominance and complicity of public sculptures, introducing possibilities for softer power to replace the existing order.

What comes to the fore is a critically speculative, humorous and poignant (beyond) human collectivism, which offers hope as we live through and recover from the global pandemic.