Welcome to Dreamland
May 10-12, 2018 7PM opening
A lover once describe me as "heretical, devilish, defiant, smutty, pervy = lascivious, wanton, lewd, indecent, non-conforming, with an endless appetite/ endless libido for the surreal and the extreme." And that is also my art, my bubble I live in, my subconscious ocean I swim in, euphorically, forever. Welcome to my dreamland.
About the Yvette Tang:
The artist spent her first 18 years in Hong Kong, back when the word “artist” was not a word she identified with. She was a lone-wolf, spending much of her time alone, swimming in the ocean, or finding bugs around trees — activities that, unbeknownst to her, would inevitably influence her creative mind later in life. Her mom suffered from depression, and was busy with constant chores, so Yvette was always by herself, with no one to play with. This was when she began living in her imaginary bubble.
Yvette is someone who has seemingly lived an endless number of lives. At 18 she started to head down the wrong road so her parents sent her to Michigan to study accounting. It was in this western state that she got her first taste of racism. This built a powerful, resilient feminist side to her which she would inevitably use as a driving force for much of her art. After 6 years she made the move to Vancouver where she would hold a eclectic range of jobs, some of which being a janitor, a black jack and roulette dealer and even a real estate agent.
By her mid 30s she had lost her mom to breast cancer. She became obsessed with drawing and ended up at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
While at Emily Carr, Yvette loved being surrounded by other obsessively creative people who were unapologetically themselves, because that’s exactly how she is.
In foundation year, she began a class called Time Material and Space. She was asked to create a piece that expressed time over a months period. Yvette decided to take a picture of her shit (her actual shit) everyday for a month and build a temple around it. She was trying re-appropriate that cathartic moment you get everyday when you are closest to yourself, just like masturbation.
For Yvette, drawing was never about making something that was pretty, it’s always about capturing an emotion.
One of her biggest drawing endeavours has been “A Drawing a Day” which she began in 2014. It was a way to challenge herself, and be creative every single day.
Eventually this drawing translated itself into print making.
This was a learning experience for her because it was a more challenging medium than the drawing she had been used to. Print making involves looking at things in reverse with everything you draw being the mirror image of what it was.
As is the case for many artists, Yvette’s art has begun to evolve once again, as she explores the world of photography. She likes surrealism and believes photography is the best way to express that. Much of Yvette’s art is a product of what she is experiencing in that moment, and that notion stands true for this photographic endeavour. Recently getting out of an 11-year relationship, she and has become hyper-sexual. She began hosting orgies and rediscovered her love of fetish. Finding herself frustrated by her dating experiences she created the surrealistic dream date with photography, which is a brand new medium for her. Her insane impulses made her buy a camera two days before the shoot. She had a photographer booked but decided she needed to do it herself. From this her series “My Dream Life” was born.
