Yuh-Shioh Wong: The Marsupial Project

Cherry and Martin presents the first West Coast exhibition of Taiwanese-born, New York-based artist Yuh-Shioh Wong’s sculptural and painterly constructions.Yuh-Shioh Wong’s installation at Cherry and Martin, entitled The Marsupial Project, takes its cues from the marsupial pouch: a space that is both an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside.’ Wong’s exhibition makes an analogy between pouches and other objects—like books—whose pages and flaps not only open and close, but also serve as places for the individual to inhabit.Roberta Smith has suggested that Yuh-Shioh Wong’s polymorphous installations “revisit Cubism and Surrealism at once.” Color, sense and touch is communicated in Wong’s work through a range of materials including paper mache and string, concrete, mirrors, seeds and Styrofoam. Formal concerns and a sense of the uncanny play an equal role, directing the viewer towards disassociative narratives.Yuh-Shioh Wong’s exhibition at Cherry and Martin will consist of several floor-based and wall-mounted elements that use improvisation and visual puns as a basis for meditation on life, objecthood and the nature of viewership. The artist reminds us that the installation is a living landscape—one that is animated by the way we look at its geography and its topological form. Yuh-Shioh Wong’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Foxy Production in New York in September 2007. Recent exhibitions include Pia Maria Martin, Haeri Yoo, Yuh-Shioh Wong at Thomas Erben Gallery (New York); FAUNA://hybrid at Charim Gallery (Vienna); and Can Buildings Curate at The Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York). She received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and an MFA in Painting from Hunter College.