Adelaide artist, chef and TV personality Poh Ling Yeow had some very personal reasons for agreeing to take part in Illuminate Adelaide this year. One of main motivating factors was making her iconic artwork more accessible for people to buy.
Yeow’s The Girl: Exhibition, on at The Light Room at The Lab in Light Square, features 37 works. These include five new large paintings, but the rest of the exhibition is a retrospective of the artist’s signature painting The Girl, including limited-edition prints for sale for the first time. The biggest painting in the exhibition is priced at around $11,000 while unframed prints will be for sale from $79.
“One of the reasons I wanted to have the exhibition was to basically launch my website, which will then enable me to sell my work for affordable prices, hence the limited-edition prints,” Yeow says.
“I’ve always had an issue with the idea that people who connected with my work couldn’t afford it. I’ve had some interesting experiences where people buy the work just because… in the moment, they think it’s a good thing to be seen to do. But the people who really connect with the work can’t afford it. It was an interesting situation I wanted to address.
“So I’ve been working for years on getting my website up and selling prints, but I just haven’t been able to get my act together because the food career kind of took over.”
All about the girl: Poh Ling Yeow’s artworks in the solo exhibition. Photo: Chloe Morris
The Girl has been a constant in Yeow’s work since she first exhibited in 2002. The image represents a kind of “alter ego” for the artist, who is a Chinese-Malaysian migrant to Australia, and the work explores themes of belonging and place.
“It’s always been The Girl,” Yeow says. “Because her story… is really all about grappling with finding your place in the world and that sense of belonging, which has always been very push/pull for me, living with two cultures.
“But I don’t tell it as a sob-story. It’s just an interesting thing I’ve grown up with… and I think it’s made for a much more diverse life experience. I’m grateful for it. But growing up, when I was less formed in my sensibilities, I did find it a bit hard, because I think parents want you to hold on to those traditions, but then understand that they’ve brought you to this new country to be a different person and to have different opportunities, and hence you are going to have different values. I always found that really hard growing up.”
The Girl: Exhibition includes paintings and limited-edition prints by Yeow. Photo: Chloe Morris
Yeow says she also immersed herself in creating works for Illuminate as a way to help deal with the grief of losing her mother Christina, who passed away in November last year after a battle with cancer.
“I saw it coming – she had been really ill – but I just had this blind faith that she would be able to fight it. I thought, ‘You’re not going to die. That’s crazy talk’,” Yeow says.
“I found out about Illuminate just a week after she passed away and I just remember the hugest relief knowing that I had this thing that I could focus on, and [that I could] pour my grief into a space of creativity, because I know that space of turning my creativity into something beautiful and being productive with the grief. That has always worked really well for me.
grief isn’t always just about the end; it can be the beginning of other things
“I’m good at grief; I’m good at sitting in it. I’m not someone who puts grief away. I really face it front on. I’ve always done it with divorces and other stuff… and it’s the same with this.
“What’s been really beautiful is I’ve recognised that Mum has left this space for me to form bonds with other people in my family that I never would have if she was still around. Because there is something about the matriarch – like, I would always talk to Dad through her, which is a generational thing as well as a cultural thing.
“So I read this poem which says that grief is very sad and beautiful at the same time. If you are aware, you can find those silver linings, so that is what the work is about. It’s about how grief isn’t always just about the end; it can be the beginning of other things.”
As well as The Light Room exhibition, Yeow has created a light installation for Illuminate’s City Lights project, where her work is projected onto iconic buildings in the East End. Five artworks are on show and are animated through technology created by Electric Canvas.
“Illuminate has been such a great experience for me, just diving back into the art and work in such a solitary way, which I love,” she says.
Get InReview in your inbox – free each Saturday. Local arts and culture – covered.
Thanks for signing up to the InReview newsletter.
“I mean, it does get a bit much after a while – you are a bit head-in-a-jar – but I do so much that is quite demanding of the extroverted side of me. I’m mainly introverted, so I do find that stuff really exhausting and it stresses me out, so it’s been really lovely to go back into that space of creating. And also just rediscovering the basic thing of remembering my roots and how I started and where I came from and what made me very happy back then. You know, before any of the TV stuff happened.
“It’s nice to rediscover The Girl. At close to half-a-century old, I can finally say I love her completely, as I do myself, but it’s been a trip.”
The Girl: Exhibition is showing in The Light Room at The Lab, 63 Light Square, from 6-11pm, July 7-23, as part of Illuminate Adelaide. City Lights, a program of free activations and installations across three CBD precincts, runs from July 7-23.
Read more Illuminate Adelaide stories and reviews here.
Support local arts journalism
Your support will help us continue the important work of InReview in publishing free professional journalism that celebrates, interrogates and amplifies arts and culture in South Australia.
Donate Here
