INSTRUMENT PRACTICE

26 Feb - 14 Mar 2020

Opening Night | Thursday 27 Feb, 6pm–8pm

Performance Series |
Opening | Thursday 27 Feb, 7pm
Closing | Saturday 14 Mar 4pm
+ informal performances throughout

Luyuan Zhang 

Instrument Practice attempts to subvert common conventions of the white cube, the practicing studio artist and their tools. The artist’s intuitive action bear a deep resonance with their experience of growing up in China, learning instruments chosen by their parents. In repositioning this reluctant gesture into the space of art, a deep nostalgia is provoked.

Isolating themselves with only workshop tools, it allows the artist to contemplate and redefine each tool’s purpose and identity. Transforming the space and its internal sense of time, the audience is led into a new perspective of the world.

Luyuan Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Melbourne. Born in 1995 in China, she then moved to Melbourne, Australia since 2014. Behind the deadpan performance in the video and the slapstick humor of the installation, Luyuan’s work reflects a period of time in the artist’s life of displacement.

IMAGE | Luyuan Zhang, Instrument Practice (Instruments), 2019. Hand saw, sawhorse, used parts from dust collector, plastic tube, wood, file, bubble levels, hand grip sandpaper, dimensions variable | Instrument Practice, 2019. Hand TV monitor controllers, hemp twine, tea mug, masking tape, cloth tape, scissors, hand saw, sawhorse, used parts from dust collector, plastic tube, wood, file, bubble levels, hand grip sandpaper, dimensions variable | Courtesy the artist.