Memorabilia
by YY
The Mirror Gift Shop
Eyeing Mirror through the window of a gift shop, artist and designer YY proposes a miscellany of hypothetical memorabilia—keepsakes inspired by each of the seven works by other artists in this collection—designed to burn a hole in your pocket and fill a hole in your heart.
‘Looking in the Goblin Mirror’ by Serenity Department
Two vases
Looking in the goblin mirror may reveal your past, illustrate your present or foresee your future. This arrangement pays tribute to Serenity Department’s exploration of the myths that bleed into the present moment from beyond it, and the unseen souls, spirits and traumas living with and within us.
Combining ancient Chinese mythology with the symbolic meanings of vanitas, this vase holds growing leaves—speaking to destiny, death and life. A flower blooms as a skeleton; life, and the present, are transient. In contrast, the red spider lily, a flower that grows on the pathway to Hell, is carved upon the vase as a symbol of immortality. The moon and stars are portrayed as the luminous yang in the dark sky (yin) that shines upon our destinies.
‘Year of the Ox’ by Andrew Brooks & Arvind Rosa Brooks
A Set of Miniatures
Greatly inspired by Arvind's drawings as well as the cosy feeling of the poem Year of the Ox, this product dwells on its comfortable home setting with gleaming yellow light and steaming mugs—despite the deep winter outside.
To carry these feelings of safety and comfort as well as the surprising capacity of small things (like pop songs), this set of miniatures carved with Arvind's drawings sit on top of a fictive vintage collection of Andrew’s poetry, written during the year of the ox.
‘Can We Call This Home?’ by Ju Bavyka
A Brooch
Ju Bavyka's piece contemplates the search for identity within a ‘home’ setting as well as the extension of the self through and beyond one’s mirror image. The self changes when the mirror is positioned differently—and located in homes past, present and future. This brooch decoratively manifests the old “home is where the heart is” idiom. On the collar of a suit, you’ll find a literal home, a place we go to sleep at night. Pinned over the heart, the mirror represents self-discovery. As others glance themselves in your heart-mirror, they may experience similar effects.
‘Yin in Shadow: Nen 念’ by Ai Yamamoto
A Keyring
The chanting, music and fluid shadows of Ai Yamamoto’s Yin in Shadow: Nen 念 are composed as an experiential montage; they are in fact home-cooked. A keyring is a close companion to home—it holds the key to the inside. Light casts shadows upon a surface, thus the appearance of yin and yang: the light and the dark, the sun and the moon. A literal translation of yin and yang dangles alongside its metaphorical meaning in Chinese culture—the moon and sun act as decorative parts of the keyring, and when combined, a balance emerges. That's how we open the gate to our soul.
‘Sometimes When the Curtains Are Open, We Wave at Each Other’ by Fayen d’Evie and Lloyd Mst
T-Shirts
In Fayen and Lloyd's collaborative, conversational work, images jump upon the surface of text, which offers a unique experience of layered description. As a medium, the t-shirt is an easy blank space that invites strangers to read both front and back sides and form their own judgements and meanings. Here, the back of the T-shirt is a blank space—a whiteboard, if you like, as cited in the text—to house the description of the images on its front, images described elsewhere in Fayen and Lloyd’s work.
‘Tired of the Future’ by Liang Luscombe
A Pair of Earrings
How can we counterbalance science-fictional visions of the future from the East and the West? These earrings pair Ultraman (a staple of growing up from primary school age in China) and Alien (a monstrous fixture of Western futurism). The design of the earrings is based on Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, showing the two characters reaching toward each other—still, no matter what they do, there is always distance between them, as there is within the cinematic Orientalism that Luscombe describes. However, if you shake your head quickly enough, visually, they might collide.
‘Not Financial Advice’ by Flatwhite Damascus & Jean Bachoura
A Phone Case & Digital Wallet
We tap our phone screens everywhere—to make a payment, to register our presence in supermarkets, to take an obligatory selfie or post about cats. Or in this instance, to watch a lecture about capitalism. We do all these things despite knowing of the blood and sweat upholding the capitalist world, or how people may have died or sold their organs in order to make or buy an iPhone.
This phone case acts a contactless digital wallet with the name E=mc²—who says only Elon Musk can name a child something outside of a One Hundred Favourite Baby Names list? The blood diamond on the cover reminds us of the uncredited knowledge and violence behind what we own, and that which Flatwhite Damascus and Jean Bachoura attempt to convey.
Demonstrating the product with a mirror selfie, this skeleton models both death and the true self, images upheld by Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Judith Butler's Subjects of Desire.
YY (Yue Yang) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Naarm (Melbourne). Born in China and raised in Beijing, Singapore and Australia, her creative practices integrate poly-linguistic cultural contexts. YY's practice and ethics are also influenced by her experiences in early childhood education, bringing experimental, playful and intuitive methods into her art and design commissions.