MELBOURNE NOW 2023 /  by cyrus tang

MELBOURNE NOW: HISTORY-MAKING EXHIBITION RETURNS IN 2023

The second edition of the ground-breaking exhibition Melbourne Now will be presented at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from March 2023. Bold in scope and scale, the exhibition highlights the extraordinary work of more than 200 Victorian-based artists, designers, studios and firms whose practices are shaping the cultural landscape of Melbourne and Victoria. I am thrilled my recent works were selected in the Melbourne Now 2023

Lacrime Rerume 4505.00s , 2016

‘The Memory Palace: Cyrus Tang’ is a major exhibition at Town Hall Gallery featuring highlights from Cyrus Tang’s multidisciplinary art practice. 

Over the past 20 years Tang has examined sentiments of nostalgia within memory and fantasy, fascinated by the paradox of reconstructing ephemeral mental images and sensations in permanent materials. She has explored ruins and decay of houses and cities, and of human bodies, while referencing current environmental and man-made catastrophes. 

Working fluidly across sculpture, photography, video and installation, the artist has a distinctive style that embraces the materiality of her media. While her photographs and video works are presented in post-production digital format, the visual effects Tang employs are analogue, often the result of labour-intensive procedures in the studio or the field. Tang’s work documents her chosen media going through a transformation, a convergence of past and present. The result is hauntingly beautiful works that often memorialise collective experiences.

This exhibition provides a range of thought-provoking contexts which offer opportunities to explore the concept of memory, culture, and the immigrant experience.   

Exhibition : Town Hall Gallery , Hawthorn

Date : 26/7/2023-14/10/2023

Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2022 /  by cyrus tang

carriage, 2021, 100 x 68 cm , archival pigment print.

“According to Tang, while wars have victors, pandemics leave only the vanquished. Believing it important to memorialise this time, she hopes to capture our collective experience. During the pandemic, the artist experienced seven lock downs in Victoria – the most frequently locked down city in the world. Deserted city life inspired her to create Carriage. The vessels of public transport, once bustling with people, now stand empty. By layering multiple images into one, the original image disappears into the composition – just as the rigid routines of our days blur into one.”

exhibition at Art Central, Hong Kong

 

PHOTO 2022 /  by cyrus tang

Linden New Art

Cyrus Tang > Time Fell Asleep in the Evening Rain

Cyrus Tang’s new series of photographic images captures the hazy, complex, blur of emotions that many of us experienced during the extended lockdown periods in Melbourne. The repercussions of that experience are yet to be fully understood, but certain commonalities are already known. Primary among them is the unusual sense of time, and an inability to locate events and occurrences as the linear trajectory of days and weeks became distorted with repetition and recurring cycles. Everything felt at once very close and very far away. There was a stifling stillness and a sense of solitude, all of which is poignantly captured in each of Tang’s weblike images.

Written by Juliette Hanson 25/1/2022

Sky Orchestra /  by cyrus tang

This project is an exploration into Confucian values of filial piety through, the lens of Chinese history and pop culture, and how it relates to my existence within a Western context.

material : residues from burnt piano

Burning ritual, 2021

archival pigment print, 90 x 90 cm