PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION 'SKIN DEEP' BY NORM YIP

Press Release

NORM YIP GOES ‘SKIN DEEP’
New Male Nude Photographs at Baileys at the Fringe

Hong Kong – ‘Skin Deep’ is a photographic exhibition by Norm Yip that further develops and explores the subject matter of the nude Asian male. With new guys from Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, this exhibition demonstrates again how Asian men can be represented in an artistic, exotic, provocative and sensuous manner. Featured will be large-scale light-box photographic transparencies, which will illuminate the gallery space of Baileys at the Fringe as Norm offers his personal vision of male beauty and aesthetic sensitivity.

This photographic exhibition explores the possibilities of extracting more that the surface to nude/semi-nude male body. Could there be more than what meets the eye? Can it transcend beyond the visual sense and into the core of the individual of either the model or viewer? Can it effectuate society in an active manner and not be just a part of the cultural history and fabric in which we live in? Will and do these photographs make an impact on how we live, see, perceive and express ourselves? In Skin Deep, the male body and face is used as a subject and a tool for investigating what lies beneath the immediate nature of the nude.

Norm elaborates, “I realize photography has become a sort of mirror to my own identity; I need it from an internal creative perspective, which could be deemed selfish. But upon releasing this work to the audience, the viewer, it becomes part of the social context and part of the fabric in which we live in, but only to the point that a message can be digested, remembered, and acted upon, whether internally or externally’.

To Norm, photography was initially a tool for releasing creative energy, like most artists that are seeking resolve and understanding of one’s self. In his investigation of the male nude, as shown in his subjects of Asian men, he discovered that his artwork touched the people around him in ways that that he never envisioned or foresaw. His Asian male nudes offered confidence to Asian men abroad and locally, empowering the racially segregated and bringing beauty to where there seemed none before.

Exhibition Details
‘Skin Deep’ will be held at the Baileys at the Fringe, Fringe Club from 16 – 28 September, 2006. 2 Lower Albert Road, Central, Hong Kong. Tel. 2521 7251. Reception will be held on Saturday, 16 September 2006, 6 – 8pm. 25% of all sales of artwork will be donated to The Society for Aids Care.

About the Photographer
Norm Yip was born and raised in Saskatchewan, Canada. He holds a B. Arts (U of Saskatchewan) and a B. Architecture (U of Toronto). In 1994, he moved to Hong Kong and worked for two years as an architect before leaving the field to pursue photography and art.

Norm Yip’s photographs of Asian males have appeared in international male publications such as 2blue and Dreamboys 2 and Hong Kong magazines G Magazine and Dim Sum. Last year, Norm published his first photography book entitled ‘The Asian Male – 1.AM’, which was well received in Hong Kong, the US/Canada and Australia.

Reviews

How much can an Asian male bare?
Not quite enough for Norm Yip
by Dave Evans
South China Morning Post, Sunday, September 17, 2006 -- [see actual review]

There's more to some of his new exhibition than meets the eye, writes David Evans - but sometimes they're just cute guys

Like many great discoveries, some of the photographs in Norm Yip's forthcoming exhibition Skin Deep came about by accident.
Sitting in his Sheung Wan office-cum-sludio-cum-home, the Saskatchewan-native says that when he was cleaning blemishes off some nude male shots, he found that by playing with the features of his digital photography software he was able to add a grainy and pixelated surface. In doing so, he created a texture that adds depth to the shots and is further accentuated by their large-scale, light-box presentation.

He indicates the texture in one of the charcoal prints that hangs on his studio wall, and says that people have sat and stared at it for hours. It's this kind of captivation that he's trying to recreate with his photographs.

"I want people to question whether we can see beyond beauty," says the 43-year-old former architect, who includes wedding photographer and artist on his CV. "I want to enhance that quality, but go deeper into the image and engage the viewer. Large-scale work has been done many times before, but big is captivating and it draws people closer. If you look, the surface is like little islands on the skin – another world. The outcome is a geographic map of the body in a colourful way."
Those familiar with Yip's artistic photography will know that black-and-white images of well-toned, young Asian males are his stock-in-trade in his quest to show a wider audience what he sees as the reality behind Asian beauty. A visit to his website's guestbook proves he's not the only one (male or female) with that view, as does the success of his book The Asian Male - 1AM.

For this latest exhibition, which opened yesterday, Yip has branched out with some abstract shots - a new departure. Of the dozen or so shots, at least half are manipulated images of males shot against a black background and with heavy use of shadow. The results are a series of disembodied torsos, many mimicking the poses of classic Renaissance sculptures, but with a hue and texture that take the viewer beyond titillation.

This foray into abstraction and manipulation may go some way to answering the question in the press release for Skin Deep -"Could there be more than meets the eye?" - in the affirmative. But the response from the other half dozen pictures is a resounding: no". The black-and-white studies of models from Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong suggest that Yip still isn't ready to let go of his roots.

"The exhibition presents a certain view and how people take that in is up to them," he says. "I didn't have an agenda. I wasn't going to show the world that Asian people are beautiful. I just got this itch. I need to show something to people. Every time I saw a face [in the photograph], I didn't get the need to [add the texture]. If the body is more towards abstraction and the model is comfortable with it, I move away from personalities. "I tried photographing two models together, but they weren't comfortable with touching each other - you can see it in the pictures. They'd be good for an exhibition on betrayal and cheating, but not for this one."

Yip's mission remains, for now at least, to raise the profile of the Asian male as a thing of beauty. He hopes this will help boost the confidence of Asian men, both in Hong Kong and abroad. He says, for instance, that finding a Hong Kong Chinese model was like pulling teeth without anesthetic.

Even among the professional models, and fitness coaches and fanatics he uses from around the region, there's still a reluctance to bare. "There was one model, Amin - his girlfriend introduced him to me. He loves his body, but he put his shirt straight back on after the shoot," says Yip.

And although male visitors to the exhibition are unlikely to feel the need to rip off their shirts and run into the street, Yip's photos offer a hint of what might lie beyond the simple homoerotic images that fuel a gay fantasy of the Asian male - although Yip says he may have a way to go to before he breaks the stereotype. "Some gay friends I have say: 'Norm, if you move towards abstraction, you're not going to sell. We just want to see more cute guys'."

David Evans

Norm Yip: "Skin Deep"
by Raimund Tse

Juxtaposition as a mental activity is probably what lingers in the minds of the viewers of "Skin Deep", the latest project by the Hong Kong-based Canadian-Chinese artist, Norm Yip. An activity per se though, the juxtaposition runs a much richer context than its rendition in the visual images, their presentation and perception by the viewers that it resides as well in the creative philosophies of the artist as another endeavour to explore further the "ownership of aesthetics" and "the relationship between the artist, objet d'art and the viewers”.

The "Skin Deep" series comprises two constituents - the "real" and the "abstract" parts. While the "real" part can be considered as a continuation of Yip's creative journey with the vehicle of nude male bodies, it is but also a prelude and juxtaposite to the "abstract" part of the series.

The "abstract" part of the series renders an experimentation of Yip in coalescing photography and "sculpture on print", as an interplay of senses, over the touch, thermoception and sight, between human bodies and human-body sculptures made of granite, marble and wood – on print, against backdrops of hues of ocean, fire and flora. One should not be surprised if such interplay dwells on one’s olfactory sense.

Beyond the realm of senses, the juxtaposites also lie in the degree of abstraction. Against the commonest macroscopic treatment of "abstract" concepts, and such on microscopic of "real", Yip attempts antagonistically in achieving “abstract” manifestation by a microscopic perspective while attaining “real” by macroscopic.

In Yip's creative philosophies, photography resides at the heart of his “physical” or “social” creative state, in which there is a low level of "ownership of aesthetics" and close "relationship between Yip and the objet d'art", alongside the “emotional” and “spiritual” states as in his works of graphite drawings and paintings respectively in which there is a higher level of aesthetics ownership and looser relationship.

Amidst the higher level of "ownership of aesthetics" and close "relationship between Yip and the objet d'art", noticeably in the “abstract” part of the series, than others in Yip’s repertoire of photography, one may, consciously or not, discern that there is a stronger yet quasi-direct interaction, unprecedented in the artist’s previous works, between Yip and the viewers in the interplay of senses residing at the latter. In that sense, this series additionally serves as a transposition of relationship between Yip and the objet d'art to that between Yip and the viewers in terms of the artistic orientation and impact.

The "Skin Deep" is an experimenting endeavour by Yip in creating "intermediate" metaphysical states of his creation, thus equipping Yip with infinite media of creation in the future.

Raimund Tse
August 29th, 2006

Raimund Tse comes to the awareness of his keen interest in arts, espeically in literature, architecture, photography, films, installation, or indeed, cross-disciplinary arts, at quite late an age. He is a writer and poet at heart, and a commentator and an appreciator of arts in training. Yet he is endeavoring to search for artistic elements in his previous work of various fields.