Nothing can make the weight of data more valuable than a global crisis. We have all been led to witness this during the past couple of years as we relied heavily on information and statistics to modify routines and decisions in an almost life-altering fashion. There were moments when one lump of data meant everything, and it was easy to see how it turned into a kind of universal language, quickly placing itself at the center of signs and symbols—into an almost sacred iconography depicting fluctuations and trends, revealing the critical casts of positives and negatives.
The language used in displaying data and statistics, as with other universal languages, quickly assumes a visual manifestation to convey its significance. In the world of numbers and rates, we have grown accustomed to their image-transformations that now have become staple, contemporary icons such as bars, graphs, and charts.
In MM Yu’s latest exhibition, she redirects our attention into these concepts while merging them with some of the essential traits found in painting. As an artist who has mastered the indissoluble combination of process and form throughout the years, her ‘drip’ paintings have established themselves as one of the more recognizable in contemporary Philippine art. In Measures, she explores yet another turn in incorporating some of the basic, albeit irreducible elements in painting: color, form, dimension, and most significantly—gravity. Following the visual motif of bars and graphs, Yu unveils a concept show, through striking display and arrangement, examining the rigidity of data against the pleasures of chance. In incredible fashion, Measures presents a wholeness where each work corresponds to the symbolic, and now more contestable ideas of information and art.
This coupling—the objectivity of data and the arbitrariness of chance, through process and through sets of arranged structures, touches on the kind of faith that we place on information and truth—and to anything that may come in between and could dangerously fall into categories of ‘untruth,’ fakery, or speculation. In this case, measure becomes judgment. One that has taken the form of visual phenomena; one that has taken the form of art and painting—to which we can measure the desire for obtaining hard facts, against the quest for faith and one’s openness to chance.
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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