After presenting the vaudevillian garden together with an op-scape and taking the audience to a-rolling and strolling with images in donut shape, Para/site Art Space is proud to present ¡§Curiosities: post-art from the edge¡¨ in April and May 2005. This is an installation exhibition comprising works from 4 artists from different background and nationality, and out of a pool of 120 proposals submitted, yet bearing the similar cutting-edge way of interpreting and re-presenting everyday life objects as art-objects out of everyday materials and found objects. And similar too, is the fact that the works may have exhibited somewhere else individually but shipped and post to the site here for an open dialogue with each other; and on what site-specificity may mean; and what everydayness may become in a playful manner.

If ¡§curious¡¨ has similar meaning with ¡§concern, eagerness, inquiring mind, inquisitiveness, interest, interestingness, intrusiveness, investigation, meddling, mental acquisitiveness, nosiness, officiousness, prying, questioning, regard, searching, snooping¡¨, yet at the same time is synonymous with ¡§anomaly, bibelot, bygone, conversation piece, curio, exoticism, freak, knickknack, marvel, monstrosity, nonesuch, objet d'art, oddity, peculiar object, prodigy, rarity, singular object, trinket, wonder¡¨; then ¡§curiosities¡¨ promises certain degree of ¡§interest¡¨ and ¡§oddity¡¨. So be there to explore how oddities may work against the norm; and how interesting an art space can become with the works of marvel.

About the artists & their works:

Ivy Ma (Hong Kong) works in varied media and the notion of using materials in art making as the ever-ending process of transmigration of Subject and Object. Her art is an expression in response to society and her experiences. Her interest in psychoanalysis reflects in the notion of art as a doll that will listen to and absorb her thoughts and emotions. In working in paint and concerning herself only in form, circles and other plane shape, Ma denies the viewers any intricate interpretation, and in doing so create intimate compositions measured only by her artistic intuition.

¡§This series of art pieces is about childhood memories, imaginations, and fantasies. The materials I choose help both myself and viewers stepping into psyche, where the space is always the enclosed room as solitude for putting ¡¥things¡¦ (memories) in and for someone to ¡¥create¡¦ (memorize) their own fairy tales.¡¨

Judy Cheung (Canada) works on kinetic installation, photography and video and has been included in exhibitions across Canada, USA, Europe and Hong Kong. Her photographic art is a continuous experimentation and investigation of perceptual reality.  Installations she constructs are often interactive, rendering a form in which the audience is propelled into a journey. She received a BFA degree from University of Calgary in 1987 and an MFA degree from Pratt Institute, New York in 1992 and is a recipient of numerous awards for her innovative projects. An active member in the arts community, she is involved as an artist, a teacher and a curator.  Cheung lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

¡§skyLink is a virtual airport.  A multi-component installation, viewers navigate through travel effects, re-created and re-contextualized by the artist, that resonate, with subtle humor, the homogeneity, banality and frequency of international travel.  The work exemplifies our cultural existence, increasingly similar and borderless, through globalized consumerism and consumption.  It embodies ephemeral moments of engagement, where spatial and tactile senses are aroused through one¡¦s perception and interaction, in an undefined territory.¡¨