LO Yuen-yi

Artist, writer and lecturer | Hong Kong, Macau

LO Yuen-yi is an artist, writer and lecturer. Her exhibitions include The Legend, Sealed and Unsealed (2003-2004), a solo exhibition showcasing in 4 venues in Hong Kong; a group show Ten Thousand Li: Chinese Infusion in Contemporary British Culture (2000-2002), the first British Chinese exhibiting tour in the UK. She was invited to the Big Draw Campaign in Victoria & Albert Museum, London in 2002. Her research work on nushu, women’s script, a matriarchal script was published in A Journal of Nushu, Women’s Script (Hong Kong: Association for the Advancement of Feminism, 2003, edition in Chinese). The upcoming publication Drawing the Writing is a compilation of her discourse on art and culture (Hong Kong: Kubrick, 2011, edition in Chinese).   She is currently teaching visual arts in the Faculty of Education, University of Macau.

Artist Statement
Drawing has been the central core in my creative work. I have been working with graphite on paper and fabrics, simple tools as preceded in both Eastern and Western drawing traditions. By appropriating some gender stereotyped Chinese characters that have the female ideograph, I have been attempting to break away from the coded registrations of language. While my drawing is an exploration for new and multiple meanings, my encounter with the writing script nushu has shed light into the disciplines of my practice. Nushu, women’s script, is believed to be created and practiced by the women in Shangjiangxu Township, Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China for some hundred years. The exclusive use of the script among women for generations well indicates that though not being able to receiving education, some women had been able to create their own means of communication to express their own desires through storytelling, orally in chants, in embroidery work, and in written form. In so doing they transformed their spaces within a culture that allowed them limited access, defining for themselves an identity which was forgotten in History. With the insight of nushu, I explore to manifest in a mundane, meticulous and repetitive manner. The performative practice “A room – traces of drawing, an installation and beyond” displays my recent work in various featured spots, making dialogues with the space and suggesting possible transpositions of boundary.