Yuen Fong Ling
Yuen Fong Ling is an artist and Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, specialising in social art practice, post-colonial art and queer art theory, and founder member of The Human Memorial Research Collective. Ling has an MFA from Glasgow School of Art (2005-7), and a Fine Art PhD by Practice from University of Lincoln entitled “A Body of Relations: Reconfiguring the Life Class” completed in 2016. Ling was recipient of the “Platform 2018-2020” bursary and residency programme at Site Gallery, supported by the Freelands Foundation. Currently, Ling is part of the visual arts panel for "Making Our Way" a five-year strategic plan for the arts led by Sheffield Culture Consortium, and appointed Commissioner for the Race Equality Commission 2020/21 supported by Sheffield City Council, focusing on the decolonisation of street names, statues and monument in the Sheffield region.
Praxis Statement
Working with people is at the heart of his practice. I use socially engaged, performance and participatory-based strategies to make work that explores historical narratives and omissions, especially from LGBTQ+, working class communities, migrant experiences in the UK. My practice was politicised by questions of British-ness, forging my own challenges to concepts of identity and representation, by exploring the critical framing of the ‘orientalised gaze’ and how the ‘exotic, other’ manifests in popular culture. Being aware of how society shaped my own sense of ‘self’ and agency, I explored the conventions of academic art practice in the ‘life class’ to question established hierarchies of power from the position of the life model, suspending my subjectivity for the complexity of the seemingly silenced and unseeing object.
Recent Projects
Recent project “Towards Memorial” (2019-ongoing) explores the making, gifting and wearing of sandals once designed and made by gay, socialist, activist, writer Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) as an alternative form of public memorial-making, operating outside of institutionalised structures and procedures associated with public art commissioning. The project enlivens the body, spirit and ideologies of Carpenter through my own, and participant’s embodiment. The process accounts for how Carpenter’s emancipatory ideals are instilled in the sandal’s design, and how they are carried forward by activists today, prompting the question “What do you stand for?”
Continuing this research, “The Human Memorial” explores the wider implication of alternative forms of public monument and memorial making, in view of the BLM movement, and recent events in the UK seeing the removal of the statues of Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes by activists and protesters. The research considers what are the timely and appropriate ways of decolonising street names, statues and monuments, and what new ways and approaches might emerge.