Weixin Chong

“In my work I explore aesthetics, tactility and sensoriality as ways of speaking; I like to look at constructed binaries; valid / invalidated, micro / macro, masculine / feminine, human / nonhuman ...and harbour desires for translations and transubstantiation of being.”

Chong's work draws from her fascination with the stylisation of natural elements, digital and organic memory systems and the relationship between surface and perceived superficiality. These concerns are seen as material metaphors for human social relationships and the psychology behind structures and projections of power, value and desire. Using diverse methods of reproducing and manipulating images across media, the artist uses signifiers of digital and organic elements to reflect on perceptions of collective histories.

Chong’s series Flores Nativiasdisplays the new printing technology of Alugraph, or Aluminium Photography, in which the inks of an image are infused into a sheet of recycled aluminium. The resulting image exhibits an extreme sense of depth, in an almost holographic, three-dimensional style. This technique, when paired with her subject matter of delicate flora, produces works which seem to inhabit an other-worldy landscape; their rendering suggesting infrared light, the skeletal forms of x-rays, uncanny remnants of ghostly matter. These recognisable natural fragments from the ‘real’ world that we know are re-placed in a surrogate twilight dream world of their own. Similarly, Beauvoircame out of a series of works entitled tout la nuit,wherein Chong collected fragments of detritus and debris from the streets, composing each image site specifically per the items she found in each particular location. Here, the remnants of dried roses, possibly taken from a cemetary, are found alongside plastic wrappers and folds of torn paper, which seem to float in a vast expanse of unknown black space; at once divorced and tied to their original origins, retaining a vague sense of place in a new landscape.