Te Tuhi presents a project by emerging Manukau-based artist Hungwei Chuang.
Hungwei Chuang probes questions of taste in art. Yet rather than offering up sound notions of beauty or aesthetics, she seeks out the ‘bad’ artwork, things that turn off both artists and their audiences alike.
An early project was her Worst Art Award 2006 in which artists were invited to submit the most terribly clichéd artwork they could produce. Another humorous project documents her Trade Me art auctions. Here Chuang sources whimsical ephemera from artists she admires and auctions them as conceptual artworks in order to provoke responses from sellers. These experiments are so successful that even Trade Me representatives become involved, removing her items on the grounds of them being ‘inappropriate’, ‘with unrealistic reserves’.
Undeterred, Chuang launches new live auctions of these rejected items directly from the Te Tuhi gallery for the duration of the exhibition.