Mandala by Diana Yong
An exhibition of large scale photographic artworks by emerging artist Diana Yong opens at Tacit Contemporary Art in August.
Yong’s digital artworks which feature an intricate layering of images of flora, birds, and butterflies – based on photographs taken by Yong in her neighbourhood of Melbourne and surrounds – are arranged by mirroring and duplication into complex compositions. The effect is mesmeric, fantastic and almost hallucinogenic in quality. The compositions explore perceptions of reality
Yong, originally from Singapore and based in Melbourne since 2004, was inspired by Buddhist mandala paintings that she stumbled across recently in a restaurant and was drawn by its expressive, spiritual, and formal characteristics.
The urge to make art arose as a deeply personal response to radically altered personal circumstances that left her facing a future with substantial caring obligations. Yong explains: “Struggling with feelings of hopelessness and depression at the time, I was very drawn to the sense of inquiry that mandalas represented, a search for meaning, and self-knowledge.”
Yong, a self-taught artist, has also drawn on the work of Seraphine Louis de Senlis (1864-1942), a French ‘Outsider’ artist who created a distinctive body of paintings depicting imaginative arrangements of repeated floral motifs.
In Yong’s works ordinary encounters with her surrounding natural environment have been transformed into the fantastic, inviting viewers to consider concepts of perception and mortality.