Trevor Yeung

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Earth to Earth, 2024

Shower Giver, 2024

Both commissioned in 2024 by Lahore Biennale Foundation

 

In his work, Hong Kong-based Trevor Yeung (b. 1988) examines different systems and how they channel and guide human affect and action, frequently diffracted through horticultural or aquatic subject matter. He is representing Hong Kong at the 2024 Venice Biennale, and has also participated in exhibitions at the Para Site (2015), Rockbund Art Museum (2019), the Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev (2021), and Kathmandu Triennale 2077 (2022).

Earth to Earth consists of two identical sets of unfired terracotta wares, installed symmetrically on either side of a window at Alhamra Art Gallery. Unfired, their materiality remains malleable, making them barometers responsive to changes in humidity, air pressure, and whatever air currents might carry their way. With one housed indoors in the climate-controlled gallery, the other outdoors and exposed to the elements, their diverging evolution over the course of the exhibition offer a real-time illustration of the entropy of environmental forces at large, as well as the slow but exorable return to nature of everything.

Shower Giver is an outdoor installation of seven dancing sprinklers, activated for 5 minutes every hour, on the hour.  By situating the work at the nursery of Shalimar Gardens, Yeung’s intervention draws attention to an integral but generally overlooked part of the site, and suggests the constant work of maintenance and renewal necessary to sustain the beautiful flora and vegetation found throughout the Gardens.  Furthermore, these sprinklers, appliances familiar from household lawns, teasingly mimic the 410 fountains that form part of the splendor of Shalimar Gardens, and give a measure of the distance between the feats of engineering that made Shalimar possible, and the way that today, many societies often take the availability of water for granted.