Min Wong: If You Are Struggling Then You Must Be Happy :)

Overview

Sculpture and installation artist Min Wong has a new show opening at Firstdraft on October 4. Titled If You Are Struggling Then You Must Be Happy 🙂, the exhibition explores spirituality, thirst for collectivism and human failure through the spectacle of US counterculture from the '60s and '70s.

An artist deeply interested in utopian concerns — in this case the utopian aspirations of West Coast counterculture and how they relate to present-day spirituality — Wong's art investigates how the once genuinely revolutionary ideas put forward during the '60s and '70s were commodified and eventually repackaged into today's self-help/self-care culture. Playfully uniting contemporary sculpture and repurposed material from the hippie era with deliberate references to her practice of Bikram yoga, Wong desires to, in her words, "present a physical space for the viewer to experience the '60s and '70s new wave counterculture as a simulacrum of lost hope, illusory dreams and shattered utopias". Promises to be an insightful show.

Don't leave Firstdraft without taking in the coinciding exhibitions from artists Cybele Cox, Aaron Christopher Rees and Masaharu Sato.

Image: Min Wong, 60-minutes (2016), shot by Grant Hancock.