Su-An Yun

3 April 1997 - 10 May 1997
Opening Reception 3 April 1997 8pm

Main Gallery:

Encounters of the Other Kind

In Su-An Yun‘s Thank you, come in… Thank you, come again! a grid of over 100 black and white photographs lines a gallery wall. Obscure and recessed within stark white borders, the images appear to be gridded twice, even three times within their outer frame. On closer viewing, the photos show themselves to be portraits of Korean convenience-store owners posed behind their counters. In photo after photo, the individual is in danger of being subsumed bu a backdrop of cigarettes, chewing gum and candy bars, which forms its own gridded display – the stacked currency of daily life and economic survival. The excessive repetition of the grid is cast infinitely inward, ever diminishing the image of the individual, of the obscure other viewed across an alienating distance, trapped within its own frame.

Thank you, come in…Thank you, come again! renders its perspective through the hand and lens of the artist negotiating the complexities of identity and representation across divides of difference. Geometric in constellation, the work simulates over-the-counter moments of fleeting engagement; it sets up a mirror of gazes, invoking subject and object to reflect the solitude and anonymity of urban spaces compounded by cultural difference.