Malaysian artist hopes her Hong Kong show can bring out shared experiences between the city and her country

Yee I-Lann’s ‘Until We Hug Again’ exhibition includes a ‘Karaoke Mat’ that encourages visitors to sing together and an invented sign language based on hugging

Her works collaborating with indigenous female weavers across Malaysia to make mats help fund projects led by the women in their local communities

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A “chapter” from Yee I-Lann’s series “Rasa Sayang” that uses images of hugging arms to represent letters of the alphabet that spell out the first line of John Donne’s poem “The Good-Morrow”: “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved?” Photo: Chat (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile), Hong Kong

Published: 2:45pm, 2 Sep 2021

Three hundred small panels are lined up in long horizontal rows, each panel showing a pair of arms in an intense shade of orange, suspended in mid-air against a cobalt blue background.

The panels form different “chapters” in Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann’s series Rasa Sayang (2014-2021), meaning “feeling of love”, which comprises several messages spelt out in an invented sign language based on a universal gesture of affection: hugging.

Yee, who hails from the island of Borneo, created the series in 2012 when she was driven to photograph people hugging as an antidote to the intense political animosity in Malaysia. She then isolated different arm positions digitally to represent the letters of the alphabet and used them to spell out messages of love and fear, which are as striking in this time of great physical and political divisions as the orange is against the blue.

The series forms part of “Until We Hug Again”, Yee’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong.

Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann says she is a “political animal” who is resistant to the homogenous identities imposed by nations and colonisers. Photo: Courtesy of Yee I-Lann

“The series started when things were very frustrating in Malaysia,” Yee says from her studio in Kota Kinabalu, the state capital of Sabah in East Malaysia. “People were talking at each other and not listening to each other.”