All posts tagged: Ivy Ma

Mimi Brown

Spring Workshop founder Mimi Brown discusses three of her favourite works from her collection. Yuk King Tan’s Rocket – Measures of Censorship (2015) is an actual rocket, though she has temporarily removed its engine so that a hapless admirer can’t accidentally set it off. Years ago, while living in Germany, Tan honed her craft in a rocket society where she shot rockets fixed with cameras into the sky, in contravention of post-war laws against aerial surveillance. Tan has long been interested in censorship and ideas surrounding who gets to speak and to see in society, and her rocket is ornamented with excerpts from texts by critical theorists Slavoj Žižek and Julia Kristeva that wrangle with this topic. She placed the most pessimistic quotations at the rocket’s base and the most hopeful at its tip, super-imposing her own argument via this reordering, and demonstrating how similar left- and right-wing dialogue and propaganda can be. With the intense focus of a rice-writer, Tan pencilled the excerpts onto the rocket in a tiny hand using no magnification, nestling …