Siow-Wey Hee＋Yumiko Yamashita Duo Exhibition

Siow-Wey Hee、Yumiko Yamashita

Sep 6 - Sep 21, 2025

Seeing is an exciting practice. But often, our practices are limited to certain ways, preventing us from seeing many things.

Siow-Wey Hee and Yumiko Yamashita—render the unseen visible and the visually familiar invisible. They present thought-provoking and sense-tickling approaches to materiality, questioning our accepted conceptions of textured reality and the meanings of objects. One artist focuses photography on what it tends to turn a blind eye to; the other uses ceramics to reveal and preserve what could easily disappear from an unfeeling sight.

Siow-Wey Hee, a Malaysian photographer based in Taiwan, concentrates on how traces left by organic and artificial activities can be visually revealed and artistically translated. With a professional background as a researcher of molecular medicine, Hee brings a scientifically trained mind to her painstaking attention to detail and methodical consideration of the environmental factors that impact her process. Yet, instead of the repeatable results pursued by natural sciences, her central focus is on fragile, rapidly decomposing objects whose transient stages of transformation are fleeting. Re-sculpted in some cases, these objects are then, almost perversely, rendered photographically permanent.

Yumiko Yamashita, working with ceramics, practices a closely related but nuanced process of giving shape to what could easily slip from our limited field of attention. Yamashita's delicately thin porcelain works, like films, carry the memories of paper and cloth, which were burned away in their making. Their existence becomes ghostly, yet when one's eye touches the surface, their impact on the texture is sensuously felt. This prompts a question: If a thing mimics another in appearance, what is it actually? And if a thing is constituted primarily the same as another but loses its function, what is it then?

While Hee’s photographic work is not a simple preservation of ruins but an aesthetic reconfiguration of the decayed, Yamashita’s ceramic exploration goes beyond a facile illustration of material existence. It discloses how our understanding of material is customarily trained to center on the end result, oblivious to the process, and is therefore never complete. Care and carefulness underlie their approach. There is a rooted strength in their super-delicate work, through which they unflinchingly face the untouchable. Juxtaposing these two lines of artistic expression, both originating from exceptional sensitivity, sets off each's particularity and, most significantly, invites the audience to join and ponder. To be there.

Seeing is valuing.

Curation｜Unfold Contemporary
Text｜Chien Lee
Japanese Translation・Editing｜Mu-Wei Huang