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CV
Born in Hong Kong, Cyrus Tang moved to Australia in 2003. She finished her Degree (Hons) of Fine Arts at Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne in 2004, and her Master of Fine Arts (Research) in Monash University, Melbourne in 2009. In these years, Cyrus has been offered by different residency programmes, including Helsinki International Artist Program 2013, The National Art Studio in South Korea in 2012, Cite International de Arts, Paris in 2009 and The Banff Centre, Canada in 2008. Her works has been shown interstate in Australia and various countries including Helsinki, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, France, Shanghai and Sweden. She is the recipient of the Asia Link 2012, Skills and Arts Development 2011 and New Work (Emerging) Grant 2009 of Australian Council for the Arts, George Mora Foundation Fellowship 2008, Theodor Urback Encouragement Award 2004, and The National Gallery of Victoria-Trustee Award 2003. She is based in Melbourne, Australia.
“My art practice reflects sentiment of nostalgia through translation of disappearance into remembrance and fantasy. It reflects my examination of the paradox of reconstructing ephemeral mental images and sensations in permanent materials.
Disappearance is a notion that an absence can be a unique and expanded form of presence. It retains an excess meaning and experience. The process about capturing the lost imply a particular mental orientation, a sense of lost promise combined, perhaps, with a desire to redeem that promise in the future. It is a contemplative mode of thought that might lead to nostalgia and resignation or to renewed activism as the past is overlaid with, and tested against, the present. My works suggest a phantasmic site of loss: an eternal absence of the sort encountered in these visual images. In my use of these materials, I stress the process of disappearance.
I think of disappearance as the vanishing or loss of something unique. That is to say, as a unique absence. Paradoxically, what disappears leaves a phantom residue, which is an excess meaning and experience. My works suggest a phantasmic site of real loss. Through out my practice, I have employed a range of variously permanent and ephemeral materials including clay, water, ash, steam, snow, human’s heartbeat, animal bones, and human hair in order to produce a visual representation suggestive of the contrast and contradiction between appearance and disappearance, and between ephemerality and permanence.”
Cyrus Tang
Artist Statement