Like many people, the artist Trevor Yeung spent his time throughout the Covid-19 lockdowns in London taking lengthy walks. And, maybe like a smaller variety of us, a few of these walks changed into homosexual cruising excursions within the metropolis’s sprawling Hampstead Heath park. However Yeung, it seems, was utilizing these journeys not for pleasure, however analysis.
The fruits of his labour at the moment are on present throughout the river at Gasworks. For his solo exhibition Comfortable Floor (till 17 December) he has positioned a reproduction of a tree trunk from the heath, constructed from cleaning soap, horizontally on the ground within the dimly lit important gallery. After adjusting their eyes to the darkness, locals would possibly recognise this as resembling the infamous “fuck tree”, the roots of which develop at an angle that positions its trunk very low to the bottom, making it extremely advantageous for one or two individuals to lie on prime of it. Human intervention has moulded the tree, too: so frequently do amorous heath-goers rub up and down in opposition to this beleaguered oak that sections of its bark have been buffed clean.
“This tree is a bodily embodiment of need, that the majority enigmatic of emotions. It’s a monument to human interactions,” Yeung says. He compares the floor of the tree to the stone steps of historic temples, polished and eroded over centuries by the ft of devotees. Certainly, the tree has acquired a totemic standing among the many metropolis’s queer group.
Set up view of Comfortable Floor at Gasworks
Courtesy of Gasworks
Yeung, who will characterize Hong Kong on the subsequent Venice Biennale, relates this undertaking to his wider fascination in decoding programs. “I’m fascinated by the unstated guidelines of homosexual cruising tradition: what you possibly can and may’t say, or do; how individuals transfer across the house.” Earlier initiatives of his, in Beijing and on the offsite Cruising Pavilion on the 2018 Venice Structure Biennale, have explored homosexual sauna tradition.
Definitely Yeung doesn’t draw back from the carnal associations of the “fuck tree”, but his London present is about extra than simply cruising. Or slightly, it’s a present about cruising in its totality—from its motivations to its execution and aftermath—which considers the charged community of social and sexual relations through which the act takes place.
Yeung makes an attempt to explicate this community by recreating not simply the tree, however his expertise of its atmosphere. The cleaning soap used to mould the tree is imbued with an “earthy” scent: a mixture of musk, soil and wooden. “Scent is extremely necessary when cruising at nighttime,” he says. “You possibly can’t see so your different senses are heightened.”
In the meantime, the exhibition’s dim lighting recreates how the artist, who has poor eyesight, would possibly expertise the location at nighttime, whereas additionally inviting viewers to think about how cruising grounds will be each areas of sanctuary and hazard.
The byproducts of human interactions on the Heath are additionally current: Yeung has gathered litter from the location and strewn it throughout sections of the ground (“individuals do not take into consideration recycling when they’re sexy,” he says). Additionally foraged from the Heath are acorns, now suspended from the ceiling like raindrops frozen in time.
Yeung says that he has been to the Heath no less than 20 instances to watch the motion, interview cruisers and scour the scene for human traces left behind. “It is like fishing, you generally have to attend and wait to catch one thing,” he says. Notably, Yeung doesn’t have interaction in sexual acts himself when endeavor this fieldwork. “I place myself because the voyeur—in presumably an identical place to the tree: a bystander. I’m not there to interact in, and even watch, the intercourse. I’m there to watch human interactions inside house.”
The present will journey to Hong Kong and China subsequent yr. As for the Hong Kong pavilion, Yeung stays tight lipped, however says that his work there’ll join the our bodies of water in Hong Kong and Venice and include “plant parts”. What precisely we’d see—or scent—will probably be revealed sooner or later, although judging from the Gasworks present, the work will possible be as elusive as it’s express.
