YO CHOW IN THE PRESENT

Playing “in the present” defines the optimal state of mind, as sports trainers often advise, to perform unburdened by the anxiety of failure, the chaos of competition, and the spectre of past setbacks. Ancient representations of in-the-present contestants—such as the fully tensile muscular array of Olympic youth in Greek statuary, or polo riders with raised mallets poised to strike in Persian painting and Tang tomb murals, or Meso-American ballplayers in sublime stillness to channel projectile force—testify to the long-standing human reverence for that heightened moment. As both artist and athlete, Yo Chow in Time Out observes and positions physical bodies crystallised in her particular Hong Kong present.

In the After Training series, she creates collage portraits of current Hong Kong sports icons (fencer Edgar Cheung Ka-long, cyclist Sarah Lee, high jumper Cecilia Yeung, boxer Rex Tso, and swimmer Siobhan Haughey) comprising cutouts of print advertisements showing their bodies frozen in stop-motion. The paradox of capturing dynamic movement in a glance remains a challenge in rendering the human form. Here Yo Chow mimics sports photography, which simultaneously monumentalises and conventionalises a singular gesture for maximal recognition: the fencer’s sword approaching full thrust; the swimmer’s fingertips surging towards the pool wall; the high jumper’s arm an extension of a horizontal body on the verge of surrendering to gravity. In contrast to the apparent present-ness and utter focus of these tableaux, the artist skillfully conveys action through agitated scissor lines and a sinuous juxtaposition of dark and light. Their commercial iconicity, marked by bright yellow rays emanating from their heads, includes no distinguishable facial features whatsoever, all the better to sell that single-minded instant of indomitability.

Yo Chow also comments on the present conditions of the sports business, which compels athletes to refashion their bodies to enhance performance. In Injurygram retention tape normally applied to the surface of the flesh as external support for injuries conversely exposes the internal muscular structure of the body. Barbie, a crudely shaped composite body made from testosterone powder attached to the limbs and head of Barbie and Ken dolls, highlights the shady practices that underlie idealised athletic shapes. Both works speak to the fundamental vulnerability of the human body, ruthlessly suppressed by the myth of projecting the mindful present and by expectations—amongst athletes and their audiences alike—of anatomical perfection.

Compressed Court, a transparent plastic compression bag shut tight to contain miscellaneous material traces of the people who share public sports facilities, ventures even further to remark upon the circulation of ordinary human bodies in Hong Kong. These left-behind items constitute an archive of a lost or abandoned past, in its present assembly a jumble of objects (a badminton racket, bedsheets, a transistor radio) that seem to defy meaningful connection or intention. Likewise, The Use of Uselessness, made up of Hong Kong team jerseys wound tightly together and fixed with resin into the shape of a gnarly tree trunk, seals the present into a visible past tense. Sliced to reveal a cross-section, reminiscent of those employed for carbon-dating, the polychromatic swirls point to a trajectory looking backward in time. In Yo Chow’s Hong Kong, art reveals the amnesia and fortitude required to live in the present.