Filipino artist recreates images from her past to understand her ‘Chineseness’ in first Hong Kong solo show, Tracings
- Growing up between two cultures in Manila, Filipino-Chinese artist MM Yu felt like ‘an outsider’, and turned to art to document the chaos of everyday life
- In her first Hong Kong exhibition, she recreates images of her family life and examines the toll Chinese-made goods are having on the Philippines’ environment
Filipino-Chinese artist MM Yu never felt like she fitted in. Born in 1978 in Manila, she straddled two cultures, speaking Tagalog and Hokkien and balancing the religious divide: her father was Buddhist, her mother Protestant.
“Growing up, I just wanted to blend in but was mocked by neighbourhood kids for having slit eyes,” she says. “Among my cousins I was the only one who didn’t go to a Chinese school […] I was always the odd one out.
To help cope with the name-calling, Yu escaped into her camera, obsessively taking photos of everyday objects. She continues today, finding beauty in the chaotic surroundings of her home city.
Painting is also a passion – she graduated from the University of the Philippines with a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting in 2001, and was a student of the late Roberto Chabet, widely regarded as the founding figure of Philippine conceptual art.
While she toyed with the idea of becoming a photojournalist, her focus was contemporary art rather than editorial work.