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17 May - 14 August 2024
London

This summer our MLS Artist Residency welcomes Sophie Hing Yee Cheung to spend 3 months living and working in London. She expands her research focus to create unique studio methods exploring dignity embodied in the human beings and nature.

Cheung (b. 1983, Hong Kong) is a Hong Kong-based artist, poet, and disability justice activist. Cheung is a firm believer that art allows her to resist stereotypical discourses and develop her own language, following her struggles of being diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia’ at age 13, and being administered psychiatric medication from 1996 to 2004.

Since 2012, she has devoted herself to community building and the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in Hong Kong. In 2015, Cheung published 'Disabilities CV: The Stories of the Persons with Psycho-social Disability in Hong Kong'* a book that examines and re-conceptualizes the multi-faceted meanings of disability, and the disability experience, in an attempt to effect a paradigm shift towards social inclusion, challenging the dichotomous relation between barriers and resources.

Given her experience in human rights advocacy, she addresses her thoughts around life transformation by exploring the idea of in-betweenness and paradox. In her practice, she uses plastics as a main medium to express acts of simultaneous addition and subtraction to delineate the passage of time. Her work seeks to maintain a meticulous equilibrium of construction and disintegration.

‘I feel like something is missing because I still have not transformed my enthusiasm and reflections of my experience in disability justice advocacy through the trials and errors in my art practice, especially when it comes to my thoughts about “dignity”: How to affirm subjectivity and integrity?’ – Sophie Hing Yee Cheung

*Author: Sophie Hing Yee Cheung. ‘Disabilities CV: The Stories of the Persons with Psycho-social Disability in Hong Kong’ 《殘疾資歷:⾹港精神障礙者⽂集》was published by Dirty Press in two editions in Hong Kong in 2015 and in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 2017.

Getting to know Cheung more:

↘︎ Mental Incapacity: Politics of Legal Subjectivity「精神病」：主體⼈格的政治

↘︎  AFIELD Study 2022 'The Construction of Ableism' Day 1, HISTORY, INSTITUTIONS, LANGUAGE with Amanda de Sá Paschoal, Leroy F Moore Jr and Sophie Cheung. Her presentation topic: "Language, power and ideology: Mental Incapacity and mental health in Hong Kong and Britain"