Mickey Yang

My work consists of objects, videos and performances that I bring together in installations. I use the visual language of things, for example “kinder-surprise” eggs and spoons - and strip them from their original meaning. I use images and atmospheres that call on our collective memory - which became even more universal in this digital era. As a Dutch citizen and daughter of Singaporean immigrants, I don’t have a specific mother tongue. The lack of a common language and the distance between me and my family created a split in my cultural identity. That’s why early on in my life I started having interest in visual communication and ended up studying media- and graphic design from 2005 until 2010. At the academy in The Hague I started developing my interest in poetry and drama that encounter impossibilities and misidentification. By using different media and materials I created distance from my own identity and its displacement, this turned my experiences into an open dialogue. Because of the lack of art and culture in my upbringing, I find it important that the public outside the art ‘scene’ should get in touch with art in a nonpretentious way. That is why I am looking for ways to combine materials without value with visual poetry and the absurd. I have experimented with materials like dough, artificial lava, foam or haze that transform over time. The materials used in my videos and audio segments stay constant. The synergies between the works create interplay between the real world, the artificial world and our collective memory. By reinterpreting the language of things I am investigating the different realities and multiple identities that we have created for ourselves.