Min Wong
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Binygurr Wirrpanda
Dancing Brolgas
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Min Wong
You can’t talk butterfly language to caterpillar people
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Hugo Michell Gallery are proud to partner with Bird in Hand Winery for this opening event.
Hugo Michell Gallery welcomes the addition of Min Wong to our represented artists!
Min Wong’s sculpture and installation practice examines metaphysical and cultural esoterica of 1970’s countercultures, ‘New Age’ spirituality and recent renewed interest towards self-help and therapeutic culture. Her installations use strategies of appropriation, corporate branding techniques and nomadic meanings that are contingent and subject to the contemporary dilemma of spirituality.
Her practice explores utopias and esoteric practices to reimagine a renewal of connection between nature, community, and spirituality in coexistence. By looking back to past and present spiritual movements, Min’s installations investigate illusory hopes, desire, failure and seeks to remodel speculative worlds as possible futures within the contemporary dystopic.
Min Wong has exhibited widely across Australia and was recently included in the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Free/State. Min has undertaken numerous international residencies including in Spain, China and Los Angeles. She has been a finalist in prizes such as Churchie Emerging Art Prize, the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize and in 2019 was the awarded the Sculpture prize for the Ghost Fisher Art Award. Her works are held in the collections of Artbank, Housemuseum, Charles Darwin University and the City of Adelaide.
We congratulate Min on her achievements thus far and look forward to working together in the future!
Min Wong's 'Born to Give not to Get' at Hugo Michell Gallery, 2022
As part of Kate Just’s exhibition PROTEST SIGNS featuring hand knitted homages to protest signs around the world, Just has created a piece to raise funds for charities working on the current Ukrainian humanitarian crisis.
This unique artwork is a hand knitted Ukrainian flag mounted on a plywood board with a Tasmanian oak picket stick. The words PEACE – in black – are knitted into the flag design.
To raise money and go into a draw to win this work, Just is inviting individual members of the public to donate $50 or more to one of three charities:
Care Australia – a Australian charity raising funds to end global poverty. They have an ongoing focus on women and girls and a specific focus on the Ukraine right now:
Click here to donate!
Go Fund me to support Vulnerable Black people in the Ukraine: Diaspora and Students – Many Black people are facing racism in Ukraine. At the borders trying to escape, they are facing abuse and refused access to trains, busses and support. Members of this Black coalition are working with partner orgs and will be travelling to bordering countries to help bring people home and ensure that this process is done smoothly.
Click here to donate!
Voices of Children – a Ukraine based charity providing psychological assistance and practical evacuation assistance to women, children and families affected by armed conflict.
Click here to donate!
You can donate to any of the three charities. $50 minimum donation, but more is encouraged and welcome.
Provide your name and receipt evidence of your donation to mail@hugomichellgallery.com
You will go into a draw to win the artwork. The draw will be done live on Instagram stories on morning of the 6th of May and the winner will be also notified by email. The more people who enter, the more impact we will have!
Basic rules:
– One entry per person regardless of amount donated
– Individuals only
– Shipping costs covered within Australia only
– Freight will be arranged after the show concludes in mid May
Pictured: Kate Just, Peace (Ukraine), 2022, knitted wool as placard with plywood stand, 56 x 50 cm
Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of William Mackinnon’s ‘The Lucky Country?’ and Min Wong’s ‘Born to give not to get’.
Spending two years between 2008 and 2010 in the Kimberley and Central Australia, William Mackinnon states that the timing of this experience helped him to ‘find his own voice as an artist’.
Having previously spent over a decade within an educational and institutional setting, studying at the University of Melbourne (2000), Chelsea School of Art and Design (2006) and completing his Masters at the Victorian College of the Arts (2008). It was the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (2008), which afforded him the opportunity to spend time away from formal education.
Mackinnon began the two-year Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, by spending twelve months in the Kimberley region of Western Australia firstly as artist in residence at Mangkaja Arts, Fitzroy Crossing. In 2010 he moved to Central Australia working as a field officer for Papunya Tula Artists. Before this time, Mackinnon was working, learning, collecting, growing up, building an extensive language and refining his skill. Keen to explore and experience a wider Australia, Mackinnon began this self-directed time with senior Indigenous artists to further an understanding and appreciation of Country and culture.
In his latest series ‘The Lucky Country?’ Mackinnon revisits this significant period of time after a number of years living abroad. An extended period of absence has allowed him an interval to reflect and reconnect with lessons lived with for a decade.
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Min Wong appropriates material culture from 1970’s to revisit this significant era of spiritual countercultures and the mash up of Eastern and Western mysticism. Writer Eric Davis describes this phenomena as the ‘modern esoteric’, a combination of anthropology and mystical pulp, between cultural criticism and extraordinary experience. More recent tendencies of contemporary spirituality is the self-help and therapeutic culture spawned from the ideology of the ‘New Age’ and its dogma practice that spiritual enlightenment comes from the self rather than the radical collective. By looking back to investigate utopian elements of previous eras, Min’s practice seeks to explore ways of understanding the contemporary esoteric and examine the illusory hopes, desire, failure and authentic search for meaning in the contemporary dystopic.
‘Born to give not to get’ examines the commodification of the spiritual self through high performing branding and prescriptive spiritual accessories such as yoga, activewear and affirmative phrases. The installation sits inside an ‘interior’, referencing gym equipment and athletic apparatus’ appropriating tropes of the self care industry. In its genuine state, self-care can be a defiant act for social justice, a holistic approach that includes emotional, mental and spiritual fulfillment that also supports the utopian collective. This exhibition examines this contemporary dilemma.
Please join us on Thursday the 18th in celebrating these two incredible exhibitions!