MSAC is honor to present a major solo exhibition, Yee I-Lann: Fluid World, by the international Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann in Taiwan. I-Lann was born in 1971 at Sabah, Malaysia. Her father is Chinese-Kadazan and her mother is New Zealander. She inherits her parent’s blended legacy and pursues the education from Malaysia and South Australia. Her mixed culture background results her works always related to identity exploration.
I-Lann has spoken of her works via pop culture, city landscape, and daily life. She explores the dialogue between traditional culture and new media via photograph, film, and installation, creating a beautiful visual graphic with infinite nostalgia and a sense of humor to interpret complex culture in the Southeast Asian archipelago. Her works express a unique feminine angle which responds the region history that has long been dominated by male.
Observing I-Lann’s works, viewers can feel an aura of poetry and retrospection.Besides that, the works are involving with her profound concerns for interwoven culture of her motherland. For less than a century ago, the world of its denizens and traffic of its cultures weaved a different pattern of migration and mobility. From Horizon, Sulu Stories, Kinabalu, to the Orang Besar Series, I-Lann’s creation includes both horizontal and vertical dimension of the body of research which has already annotated the fluid and interwoven culture in the Southeast Asian archipelago.
I-Lann explores cultural identity through her creation which makes us to rethink the issue of race, class, sexuality, and culture difference. I believe it is much more meaningful for our Taiwanese who are sharing similar island and colonized culture with this Malaysian artist.
