An exhibition of large scale photographic artworks by emerging artist Diana Yong opens at Tacit Galleries in August.
Yong’s digital artworks feature an intricate layering of images of flora, birds and butterflies – based on photographs taken by Yong in her neighbourhood of Preston and surrounds – arranged by mirroring and duplication into complex compositions that produce a mesmerising, fantastic and almost hallucinogenic effect.
Yong, originally from Singapore and based in Melbourne since 2004, was inspired by Buddhist mandala paintings that were a part of her childhood. She stumbled across one recently in a Tibetan restaurant and was drawn by its expressive, spiritual and formal characteristics.
The urge to make art arose as a deeply personal response to radically altered personal circumstances that left her facing a future with substantial caring obligations.
Yong explains: “Struggling with feelings of hopelessness and depression at the time, I was very drawn to the sense of inquiry that mandala’s represented, a search for meaning and self-knowledge.”
Yong, a self-taught artist, has also drawn on the work of Seraphine Louis de Senlis (1864-1942), a French ‘Outsider’ artist who created a distinctive body of paintings depicting imaginative arrangements of repeated floral motifs.
In Yong’s works ordinary encounters with her surrounding natural environment have been transformed into the fantastic, inviting viewers to consider concepts of perception and mortality. Seven C-type photographic compositions mounted on foamcore – each 106 cm squared – will be on display in the exhibition titled Mandala.
Mandala, 1-26 August 2018, Wednesday – Sunday, 11am–5pm
Tacit Galleries, 123a Gipps St, Collingwood T 0423 323 188
Image: Mandala #2, digital artwork, 106 x 106 cm.