Affection
solo exhibition, Firstdraft
Affection can mean feelings of fondness or acts of tenderness when one cares for someone; or it can be a disease, a malady. // Self-disclosure can be a double-edged sword. It draws people closer, yet too much knowledge has the potential to drive others away.
Presupposing one cannot fully know themselves in isolation, relationships become a mirror that reveal different angles of the self and our personal histories. At once, we are shaped by encounters and capable of imprinting on other people’s lives.
In Affection, Celine Cheung presents a candid self-examination touching on a spectrum of intimate experiences that are interconnected. The show features performances conceived and documented over the first 6 years of her practice alongside new works, contextualising them within a continuum where past and present selves meet. Affection treads through shades of grey in interpersonal relationships — implicating strangers and lovers alike. Inviting the audience to come into relation with the artist, this configuration of artworks interrogates ways of seeing and critically positions identity as a departure point to interrelations.
Affection brings together artworks that explore ideas of obsession and objectification; fantasy and culpability; sentimentality and subjectivity. The suite of works sees to her inhabiting different roles as victim and violator, to invoke discussions of power, agency and gender dynamics. Ever-present is an awareness of the gaze, paralleled with a relentless desire to self- dissect. Does reflection lend itself to lessons? Embracing the spirit of “do it for the plot”, the exhibition is part confessional, part narrative, as the artist negotiates between vulnerability and a refusal to be completely known.
Cover image on home page by Nolan Ho Wung Murphy
View the Exhibition Roomsheet
But You’re Not Innocent, 2019Performance documentation, displayed with artefacts used in the performance: Chinese ink stick and stone, glass teapot and water
7 Minutes in Heaven, 2018-24Performance on single-channel video, textiles installation with mesh, satin ribbons and piano bench
Check Your Baggage at the Door, 2024Photocollage prints, 30 x 43 cm each
In this series, I scanned and digitally manipulated images of objects given to me by my past partners, dates or flings, forming an unreliable archive of my love life. Earlier in the year, I was purging my belongings Marie Kondo-style when I found this collection of letters and gifts. Moved by an urge to preserve them, I turned to digitisation. In a manner inspired by x-ray baggage scanning at airports, these collages peer into an inner lining of my emotional life. The work investigates how affection and possession(s) become inextricable. It asks whether sentimentality is transferrable and invites the viewer to piece together a story behind these objects.
All that’s said and done, 2024Engraved mirrors and written text on gallery walls, 480 x 20 cm and dimensions variable,
It is said that the human body completely renews itself every 7 years. Yet I still find myself unchanged in essence, relating to my past self and falling back into cycles of patterns. I scoured my diary for quotes to be engraved onto blank mirrors. Removed from its circumstances and devoid of specificity, I reconfigured thoughts from varying time periods to form a vague narrative –– one of constant questioning and fallibility.
Photos by Jessica Maurer