Material as Language: In Conversation with Man Yau
Man Yau, Rosie Wallpaper 02, 2025. Forged steel, mouth-blown glass, porcelain, glaze, pearl thread, silky ribbon. Dimensions vary according to the space. Photography by Antti Sompinmäki, image courtesy by the artist and Tampere Art Museum.
At first glance, the precisely crafted installations of artist Man Yau draw you in with their refinement and apparent delicacy. Upon closer look, a teary eye or a steel thorn pierced through a porcelain petal, evokes a sense of something deeper. In Yau’s work, painful subjects like exotification and tacit violence reveal themselves through the works’ materiality and visual references.
In this conversation, the artist delves into the ways she processes and expresses experiences with materials, as well as her current solo exhibition at Tampere Art Museum, which is connected to the Finnish Young Artist of the Year 2025 award, a prize that has been given to artists under 35 for four decades.
Marthe Yung Mee Hansen: Congratulations on your current exhibition! The show will be a retrospective, with works stretching from your early days as an artist up until installations recently made that will be shown for the first time in this exhibition. Can you tell us something about what visitors can expect to see?
Man Yau: Yes, so the oldest works that will be exhibited are from back in 2011. I will also show some of my designs and tests, as well as some pieces that are a little more unfinished, as I thought it would be suitable for an exhibition called Young Artist of the Year. These will make up a sort of path of testing and material joy, leading to an area where you can see that I started to become more interested in working with installations.
This is all part of the retrospective section of the exhibition, titled Hi-fire Dream. To me, this captures the value of creating, particularly through material exploration. In the second part of the exhibition, Peep show, I present completely new works.
Man Yau, Rosie Wallpaper 01 (detail), 2022. Forged steel, glass, cast aluminum, porcelain, silky ribbon. Dimensions vary according to the space (installation view from Kunsthalle Helsinki, 2023). Photography by Patrik Rastenberger.
MYMH: You define your artistic practice as “material-based,” and certain materials such as porcelain, glass, metal, and silk recur in your work. What role do materials hold in your practice?
MY: It is everything. This is going to sound like such a cliché, but to me, materials are more accurate than words. I am not good at writing or talking about my work, but materials are almost like words or language to me. I am not saying that my works communicate in the same ways as we use words—it is more about using the materials and their associations to their or our history. To me, they hold more information than specific words.
There is also the aspect of working with the materials. It is a practical way of being rooted in time, as well as in the topics that I am dealing with. Some of my works come from quite painful places. I can take the work Rosie Wallpaper 01 (2022) [currently on view in Rock, Paper, Scissors at Kiasma—Museum of Contemporary Art] as an example: When I was deciding on materials, like whether it should be Tiffany glass here, porcelain there, and so on, I was thinking about the material histories related to my topic of exoticization. Whether it be the association of Tiffany glass with church architecture, silk being a well-known commodity from the East, or forged steel as a reference to physical labour. Then there is the process of forcing all of them into industrial-like forms.
All of this somehow reflects my research on how visual culture comes to accept certain narratives, such as reduced ideas of a culture or personal experiences. So I’m kind of “material coding,” because every single material is so carefully selected, and sometimes it doesn’t even make sense to anyone else except for me. But there is always a reason behind why I chose it.
Man Yau, M.Y. Chinoiserie, 2021. Ceramics, glaze, ceramic decals (on-glaze), baroque pearls, silky ribbon, blued steel 200 × 160 × 60 cm. (Installation view from Gallery Elverket, 2024). Photography by Ahmed Alalousi.
MYMH: Your work is described as exploring feelings of “being on display and under pressure”, specifically from the perspective of a woman and BIPOC artist in a Western society. Can you elaborate on this?
MY: This expression means several things. I choose to use it as a bit of a more poetic sentence to talk about something very personal, vulnerable, and painful in public spaces. But what it means is being exoticized: being noticed, but at the same time being pushed into a mold. The expression is a way for me to express something that has affected my whole life—my whole body, my whole identity—without revealing all the wounds and all these specific experiences in detail.
Being exoticized is a shared experience—I cannot emphasize that enough. So using this sentence, as well as certain visual elements that are relatable, recognizable, or carry meaning for other people too, is a way of talking about these experiences.
MYMH: This is also something I sense strongly in works of yours that have elements of corporeality, e.g., in M.Y. Chinoiserie (2021) and more recently in Faux Bone China and Artemis (arrows) (both 2024). Is this a way of confronting—and possibly reclaiming—the gaze with which our bodies have been perceived for centuries?
MY: I guess you can say it is. I use bodily experience very purposely. I think about things like: “If I use this sharp thing here and I place something on top of it here, it would almost feel like it is going to come at you”. And I think about it when I install the works too. For instance, if something sharp is placed at eye-level, as in M.Y. Chinoiserie[1], it is going to make the viewer feel very uncomfortable.
I consider the works Faux Bone China, alongside self-portrait (2024) and Artemis (arrows), as an outfit. Through these works, I wanted to highlight the complexities of the performative femme body. Faux Bone China looks like a jacket that could also resemble armour. Then there is self-portrait, with the shape of a cowboy hat, which has these very macho connotations, and the chopine shoes. The corporeal aspect was important; I was thinking of how the pieces would feel against the body—what it would be like to put on a jacket made of porcelain or a pair of shoes cast in bronze with spikes on them. An outfit of armour may look empowering, but wearing it can also be a draining or painful experience. I remember when I looked at these works in my studio, I felt like there was something missing, and I caught myself thinking that I was repeating the same image of a woman, not moving, almost being a product. So I sought something that would activate the installation, and while I was in Denmark, I developed the idea for the arrows with hands at the tips.
Installation view: Faux Bone China, Bow boots, self-portrait, and Artemis (arrows). (Installation view from WHILE I CAST A SHADOW ALREADY CAST, TIME LEAKS STEADILY OUT OF MY PALM, Pitted Dates, 2025). Photography by Sakari Tervo.
Furthermore, Faux Bone China is decorated in both personal and art historical references. The armour is covered in works by non-male artists that put the femme power in the center, such as Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (ca. 1612–1613). The depicted artworks point towards how these artists were dealing with issues connected to gender, identity, and politics. Alongside these works that I find very empowering, there are images from important moments in my own life. Some are painful memories, and some are lovely. The jacket is also filled with my crying eyes, referencing eye miniatures from 1800 England. These were small works depicting the eye of a loved one, often worn as brooches or pendants, somehow making someone’s body part into an object.
MYMH: In some of your work, you reference visual expressions that stem from Eastern cultures, such as chinoiserie and binding. What made you engage with these kinds of expressions?
MY: These references are part of the “material coding” that I mentioned earlier. I have always been interested in the visual culture that surrounds us, both in past and present times. Taking such expressions, some of which are deeply rooted in our understanding of history, works a bit like the sentence we discussed before: “being on display and under pressure”. It gives me a certain distance to deal with these experiences and topics. The visual expressions give some weird and awful logic to why someone is treating me in a certain way. And while I find this logic very toxic, it does, in some sense, provide insights to understand why someone might have certain assumptions. So I use stereotypes about myself, as if I’m appropriating the appropriated stuff back.
Man Yau, Peep show, installation views at Tampere Art Museum. Left: HARDENER 02, 2025. Cast bronze, patina, wax, porcelain, glaze, ceramic decals (on-glaze), towel, 17 × 22 × 33 cm. Right: POLISHER, 2025. Cast bronze, patina, wax, porcelain, glaze, ceramic decals (on-glaze), towel, 15 × 40 × 15 cm. Photography by Patrik Rastenberger, image courtesy of the artist and Tampere Art Museum.
MYMH: Lastly, I would like to circle back to your upcoming exhibition at Tampere Art Museum. You introduce a series called performers. Can you talk about what this entails and the performative aspects of these works?
MY: Yes, I was thinking about the performative aspect on different levels. The works are installed in these “stages,” a curtain area that makes them seem like something private, and they are placed at levels that will have the viewer bend their body to be able to really see them. When they are in the act of looking, they will discover that each work contains what one could call pornographic elements. I thought a long time about whether it would be okay to make the viewer become a voyeur or peeper without them knowing until they are already doing it. But the works are dealing with an othering gaze—to be objectified—in situations that turn me into a pearl, which is something one of the works is depicting specifically. Again, viewers may or may not notice their part in the peep show.
At the same time, the sculptures are also performers. They reveal themselves to the viewer. HARDENER 02 (2025) and POLISHER (2025) consist of bronze feet and hands with porcelain nails. On the toenails in HARDENER 02 are self-portraits that are more staged than the ones in Faux Bone China. This is the first time I am using the body, or images of the body, in such a straightforward way, so there is also this level of meta-performance: Am I performing? In POLISHER, the fingernails have pictures of classical sculptures from ancient Greece or works inspired by them, and the nails are trimmed in order to make the familiar figures from European mythology look pornographic.
The third performer, self portrait (2025), takes the form of a pearl necklace because I sought a form in which the body is absent. Two of the pearls will have the image of my eyes, and the rest of them are in the same style as in HARDENER 02, but they are shaped so that the body is just slightly visible. The work depicts both my disappearing and the absence of a body. Through the three performers, I am trying to deal with tacit violence, something that I find difficult to convey in words. So again, I turn to materials to express it.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Left: Man Yau, Peep show, installation view at Tampere Art Museum: self-portrait, 2025. Porcelain, glaze, ceramic decals (on-glaze), silver, jewelry holder (wood, velvet), 40 × 30 × 20 cm. Photography by Patrik Rastenberger, image courtesy of the artist and Tampere Art Museum. Right: Artist portrait. Photography by Sakari Piippo, image courtesy of the artist and Tampere Art Museum.
Young Artist of the Year 2025—Man Yau is on view at Tampere Art Museum from September 17, 2025 through January 11, 2026.
[1] Read more about chinoiserie, a style of art, furniture, decoration, etc., with Chinese or East Asian influences in design popular in 18th-century Europe, here.
