Everyday takes off from images taken by MM Yu of her surroundings. Having amassed a visual archive of objects outside of her home, Yu’s work speaks of the urban, excess, and detritus.
In Everyday, Yu puts together images of found garbage and decaying matter printed on various surfaces such as cards and cloth, and with video work. In the middle of the room stands a carousel, filled with postcards of typical yet strange, minute details of the city. Opposite to her postcards, Yu distorts a bird’s-eye view image of trash and turns it into bedding lining a mattress and hung on the wall. Photographs on cloth of mounds of trash are hung up on the wall and on the floor lies an image of a sheet of glue trap and the insects and rats that had gotten stuck printed on a doormat. As videos, Yu’s “No Signal” gives us lengthier absurd snapshots of the city, showing us clips of traffic enforcers dancing, a boxing match, and processions.
Yu’s works in Everyday look into the reality of living in a city like Manila. Yu’s photographs of garbage coupled with domestic items such as beds and couches are telling of the way that we live and navigate through our city. In the same way, Yu’s works evidence the tangible and intangible gridlocks that we face, including traffic and signal issues. Without aiming to be didactic, Yu’s work only turns our eye on that which we already know and are faced with daily. The postcards themselves are images of the visible yet unbroadcasted. Our visual memory of Manila does not consist of purely historical or industrialized buildings but is also composed of amusing signages, cockroaches, and entangled electrical posts—a clear contrast to idyllic beachfront landscapes fronted by tourist shops.
Yu’s practice has worked between painting and photography. Her work in Everyday harks back to her ongoing project of daily compulsive documentation. This growing archive has chronicled day-to-day life, with its sheer size allowing for various permutations in colors, subjects, and sceneries. Through the years, Yu’s photographs have charted the growth and landscape of a densely populated city, capturing its inhabitants, homes, infrastructures, and consumption.
About the Artist
About the Artists
MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.
These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.
The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.
MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).
Related Exhibitions
About the Artists
About the Artist
MM Yu (b. 1978) lives and works in Manila, Philippines. Her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure and its waste product as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.
These recorded static scenarios show through their thematic variety the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. The diverse elements in her works not only underscore the inability of photography to account for fractured temporality. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.
The impact lies in how photography is employed to investigate another subject namely that of memory. By consolidating a series of routine snapshots traversing the streets of Manila. The hybrid and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction.
MM Yu received her BFA Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013). She is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), the Goethe Institute Workshop Grant (2014), and the Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011). She was also a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2010).
Related Exhibitions
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