A room full of tanks with no fish inside is the first-level experience of the Hong Kong Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, where artist Trevor Yeung and curator Olivia Chow have conceived a complexly structured and entangled environment to expose natural dynamics occurring at a micro and macro level. Titled “Courtyard of Attachments” and organized by the M+ Museum and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC), the pavilion showcases eleven new artworks, each with operating aquariums, four of which are specific to Venice and respond to the architecture of the exhibition venue.
The courtyard’s Pond of Never Enough, Salty Lover (Venice) is a site-specific fountain that extracts water from Venice’s Grand Canal to filter and clean. Yeung revives childhood memories in this piece, inspired by the changing selection of fish and crustaceans in the display tanks of Yeung’s father’s seafood restaurant. Another installation, Two Unwanted Lovers, in Room 1, evokes the reception areas of typical small businesses in Hong Kong, with objects for good luck welcoming visitors. Further in, a jar on top of a cabinet, Salty Lover (Venice), continuously collects the salt accumulating on the walls, unveiling the composition of the air and atmosphere in Venice. Meanwhile, Night Mushroom in Shade (Teak Cabinet) is inhabited by uncannily efflorescent toxic fungi, living in a parallel reality.
The most memorable experience is in the main room: the immersive installation Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours), which recreates the interior of a pet shop with aquariums devoid of fish or other creatures. With the absence of their usual inhabitants, the artist encourages us to focus instead on the system of interactions between the ongoing biological and chemical dynamics that are still happening at a microscopic level and the technological ones designed by humans for these artificial environments. At the same time, the one-way mirrors inside the tanks force us to look at ourselves while staring at the artwork, leading one to feel trapped inside those tanks with their mesmerizing atmosphere created by the violet lights and the continuous water flux within. In this way, the installation encourages us to adopt the fish’s perspective within the human-designed structures, prompting questions about whether what we design for the benefit of those creatures is really what they need or if we are always unavoidably biased by our fundamentally anthropocentric perspective.
An uncanny palpable sense of absence reveals the fragile equilibrium that characterizes all our relationships with other species. The work was inspired by the artist’s experiences keeping pet fish and seeing many fish in tanks at his father’s restaurant, as well as restaurants across Asia. The hypnotic environment ultimately reveals critical dynamics in the relationship between humans and other species and the surrounding natural phenomena. “Eventually, it is all about the fine line between caring and over-controlling,” explains Yeung, referring to the delicate balance necessary to preserve our vulnerable ecosystems, whether among friends, lovers or communities.
When Observer met the artist to discuss the project, Yeung was in London and about to return to Venice to regulate the system. The composition of water and the organic processes happening on a microscopic level, he explained when we spoke, require periodic maintenance on his side. But this was part of the project, making it a sort of test or experiment. As we discussed the technical difficulties of “Courtyard of Attachments,” we learned that Yeung made some significant changes for Venice versus the previous presentation in Hong Kong because the water composition is very different in the two places. He noted that such differences affect our lives and behaviors, though the effect can be small. Yeung described trying to iron clothes in Venice and needing to buy special water. “In Hong Kong, we get that directly from the tap.”
His works demonstrate how our human behavior is also profoundly influenced by nature, in which we are part of an ecosystem, and as Trevor Yeoung’s installation suggests, the environment cannot be isolated from us despite our continuous attempts to control and contain it. It’s part of us, and we are part of it, as all living beings have internal interconnections with other living beings via their microbiomes. The exhibition explores these complex systems of interconnections we often ignore and frequently disrupt with our anthropocentric behavior.
The Hong Kong-born artist has made his name internationally with an artistic practice that operates at the intersection of art and science. He integrates natural processes into the work and makes nature a creative medium of collaboration: human-nature. However, as Yeung told Observer, working with nature is different from working with humans in performances as it requires a willingness to give up complete control. “Nature will not tell you what to do. You have to understand, study and get closer to these other creatures. It’s not about asking but observing, which can take years.”
In this sense, Yeung’s process of art making appears closer to the scientific method, which consists of observing, forming a hypothesis, conducting experiments, analyzing results and drawing conclusions. Nevertheless, Yeung believes that scientists and artists have different responsibilities and roles. Artists need to translate information into powerful visual or multisensory metaphors that can make it more accessible to an audience.
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Yeung’s installations are also metaphors for human relations—a tool to investigate our interactions with nature. He explained during our conversation that he has been working with living objects and, from that, with the human condition, is creating a platform to understand each other. “I always use nature to see humans better, but at the same time, I also use human behaviors to see nature,” he said. Yeung recalls that when people come to see the exhibition, parents, in particular, are the ones who connect with the central installation Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours), seeing in it something that resonates with their concerns and struggle to understand what is best for their children.
Most of the works also evoke, quite poetically, relational and emotional dynamics, like Mx. Trying-My-Best, Two Unwanted Lovers, Night MushrShaden shade (Teak Cabinet), Rolling Gold Fountain, Little, Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours) and Comfy Tornado, the stealth that doesn’t hurt/the scratch that doesn’t help, which consists of a miniature tornado whirling inside a small fish tank placed atop a tower of stacked plants. “People ask where the tornado is, as they don’t consider that for the fish that mechanism is already a terrible threat, causing unease and disrupting the normal balance in the water.”
In dealing with these themes, Yeung brings a distinctive perspective shaped by his origins. This tension between urbanism and nature, the Anthropocene and other entities is, in fact, even more evident in Hong Kong. In this tropical territory, nature is resilient against the constantly expanding urbanism. However, the artist clarified, nature in a system like Hong Kong is always controlled, maintained and contained by human intervention or even manmade, as is the case with artificial beaches. His works poetically problematize this tension created by the accelerated modernization and urbanization that suppressed all the preexisting balance in the human-nature coexistence.
“When I was younger, I was visiting my grandparents in a village in mainland China, but with the developments in the 1990s, those villages in China started to become a city,” he said. “I was coming back every summer, and the village was rapidly changing year after year.” The fish pond in front of his grandparents’ home got smaller and smaller until it was no longer there. Everything was rapidly becoming artificial and changing how the people who lived in that place interacted with what nature was left.
The entire pavilion is an exercise in understanding how humans interact with nature by creating systems that artificially control and disrupt the ordinary course of these phenomena. Yeung wanted to encourage reflection on how our “caretaking” of nature might not always be beneficial and how, with time, it might also be detrimental to us. “There’s a lot of guilt in those artworks,” Yeung said, proving that even an attachment to something can be dangerous if not accompanied by sympathy—specifically sympathy in its original ancient Greek: “the state of feeling together.”
waste, and water. © Trevor Yeung Photo © South Ho. Commissioned by M+, 2024
By questioning these networks of dependence and the fine line between taking care and taking control, Yeung demonstrates how transitioning from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene will require a complete shift in our life paradigm, embracing interconnectedness and surpassing traditional hierarchies that place humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Yeung’s practices in Venice and elsewhere inspire an exercise in “sum biocentric human intelligence,” as theorized by Glenn Albrecht, to embrace the symbiotic and mutually reinforcing, life-reproducing forms and processes found in all living systems. Only in this way can humans reintegrate themselves, emotionally, psychologically and technologically into nature and natural systems.
“Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments“ is on view in front of the Arsenale until the end of the Venice Biennale on November 24.