Technological Performance Tactics With Michael Yuen

Michael Yuen is an Australian-born Chinese artist, formally trained as a composer, who works across several different mediums including sound, light, and performance. His works investigate the city and public space through a variety of events and interventions, each performed with a prankster’s humor and an artist’s cultural sensitivity. Yuen has set up an institute of contemporary art on the back of a donkey, convinced dozens of clueless Chinese tourists to flash mob him, and created some provocative interactive installations.

In recent years, Yuen has returned to his homeland for art making and exhibiting, where he continues to investigate the nature of city life through spontaneous action and public intervention. Choosing to move away from making music, he explains more about the nature of his body of new work:

My work with public space began with an interest in the life of streets and cities through my sound installations: the way cities move, breathe and change through the day. At this time I had the happy fortune that my sound installations did not fit easily within the visual art framework of galleries and museums.

In Black Tee (2007), Yuen maintains his minimal approach to art, creating a basic, sci-fi style T-shirt. The shirts, hand stitched with conductive threads and adorned with an LED on the back, came complete with a lightweight and detachable power pack. By keeping the design of the T-shirts consistent, the relationship between the garment and each individual wearer is easily transferable. Expressing technology’s influence on connection, the photo documentation of Black Tee attempts to make wearable tech accessible to everyone. Developed at the reSkin Wearable Technology Lab, the finished works compiled photographs of the T-shirts worn in downtown Hong Kong (2007) and in Parisian museums (2009).

In Follow (2007) Yuen hired 50 people to follow him throughout his daily routine as he met with friends, artists, curators, shopped, and visited the bank. The group steadily grew to 100 followers as curious bystanders joined the pack. Yuen said: “It was a pilgrimage, a protest, bought stardom, a human roadblock, a labour strike, a fanatical pack, a mob, and a march. Follow, for me, is foremost a public action resonating throughout a city. It is the hiring of a crowd’s services.”

Michael Yuen is also the co-founder of the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Arts (DICA), an initiative dedicated to supporting experimental contemporary art on the back of a donkey. DICA demonstrates the donkey’s spirit of steadfast oblivion, by doing so with the slowest possible speed, the most idle tactics, and wandering work ethics.

Images courtesy of Michael Yuen.