"Plastic" as a word suggests many different connotations, yet adheres to none. It points to the limitation of language, and challenges the value-laden binary opposition of artificial/natural, temporary/permanent, light/strong, and surface/structure. Plastic, as a product of technology, is able to possess these contradictory properties simultaneously. It transcends or complicates these binaries and creates a state of paradox.

At Para/Site, Tse plans to incorporate plastics found locally, as plastics form the daily landscape in Hong Kong. They appear as different aesthetics, and are imbued with coding of class, taste, and attitude towards "progress". Conceptually, she allows the boundary between architecture, fashion and natural landscapes to become plastic, that is, fluid.

Tse is a native of Hong Kong. She moved to the US in 1990 and remained since then. After graduating with an MFA at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1996, she has exhibited widely in the US, Europe, and New Zealand.

Phoebe Man Constructs Prostheses

Phoebe's Work studied the Cyber Space. Since the new technology gives more choices of life style for the people, she used it to study the issue of desire, gender and cultural difference.

A Masquerade on the Internet (www.cyman.net/interface.html)
Phoebe worked with her male friends to construct prostheses in a chat room with a separate body and mind. The body that was seen in the chat room was her body. It was only used to construct their images of an ideal woman in cyber space. She tried not to have a mind and let her friends control her body, tell her what to do in the chat room. The minds of her body are her male friends' unconscious("feminie")?part of their minds. She asked them to try to speak as a woman in the chat room. She wants to explore the multiplicity of a person, how desires are created, how far a body without a mind can go, how gender and bodies are socially constructed and the tension between genders.

Disembodied Bodies (www.cyman.net/disembodied.html)
People now can see each other live by using web cams in chat rooms. Does the advent of it bring the space closer to reality? Did it change the nature of the cyber space? She want to ask these questions by showing obviously unreal bodies: a walking vagina and an image of a naked woman and meet people in the chat room. The images tried to imitate and ridicule a common body presentation in the chat room: framing and exaggerating their sex organs. Are they real bodies or are they just a form of prostheses? If the bodies are not real bodies and we cannot experience it in the real world, why are people are still obsessed? She tries to find the answer through her work.

Rati (www.cyman.net/rati.html)
This work tried to further discuss the images and sexuality of women. It is a story about a walking vagina, Rati (a Hindu/Balinese Goddess name), trying to find out what she should be. The work will be place under the catalogue of pornography on the Internet. She tried to place another view of sexuality on it since the cyberspace is a heaven for pornographers.

Phoebe will show video, computer print out and web site in this exhibition. Her work is kind of self exploration but it can also reflect the culture ofa society. She just received her master degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her works were showed in United States, Taiwan, Australia and Mexico.

For further inquiries, please contact: Fred Chak (25174620), Phoebe Man and Shirley Tse.