Article by Taneesha Ahmed Interval; A Narrative Psychosis Interval; A Narrative Psychosis is an exhibition by Kai-Oi-Jay-Yung, which shows the artists

current cumulative project. Since 2007 she has travelled from Hong Kong and the South China Seas to San Francisco and Palm Springs, California researching places and interviewing people along her journey. The result is a multi channel video installation that has been included in the Cornerhouses Edition, an annual programme that considers itself to be platform for risk taking ideas and cross disciplinary collaborations. Yung is an interdisciplinary artist and her practice is an engagement with film, installation, sculpture and craft. For this exhibition Yung has inhabited the whole of the second floor. The artist has moved herself into the space- and as you are essentially entering her home for her current practice. When you open the front door to her art abode, you enter a foreign space. Foreign in more than one aspect, where you will be simultaneously transported back in time and sent to South East Asia and America. The first piece of work accesses the viewer aurally, as Disney songs reverberate between the two front rooms. The song A Whole New World is the soundtrack to the two video pieces of in this chapter and she categorises them as ambient in her video synopsis. Video1 titled New World is a short film, where we see a bright-eyed Yung walk animatedly and excitedly around Hong Kongs Disney World. The content of the film fluctuates between her and other figures such as an Alice n the Wonderland who also happens to be a face reader. The inclusion of this character is worth noting, as it was Alice who fell miles down through a tunnel to find herself in an alternate world, and here Yung presents her own fairy tale where she discovers her own set of alternate existences. Along the brightly painted walls of the fake rooms and hallways are some black

and white photos of the artist in a vaguely Victorian style of dress. The contrast is vivid, as we the spectator try to make the connection between the content of the brightly saturated videos of the present fake world she is entering and the photos act as a archive of the ambiguous and fragmented past. These videos within the entrance space mimic the readers journey through the space, as they too are visually absorbing the textures of this new ephemeral realm, where Yung shows us a whole new world and whole new fantastic point of view. After you have passed the preliminary hallway, into the main room you are then confronted with what seems to be an infinite series of doors and windows, and like Alice, you are left curiously hungry to see what is hiding behind each one. The structure of the floor plan has been radically re-configured; the space has been constructed to be a combination of a Victorian town house, a shantytown, an oldfashioned country western saloon and a Chinese temple. The fake constructed walls are painted bright primary colours while some remain raw. Here she has housed the rest of her films, which she states is the content of practice.

Whether you are aware of the original floor plan of the second floor at the Cornerhouse is not important, as Yung has creatively challenged the spectators spatial awareness. As if by magic, she has managed to simultaneously create a space that feels much smaller, or as she describes it as compact, but maintains a sense of vastness. There are two main films that the space itself guides us to watch at length. The first of these is the Sarah Winchester; A mystery House, which is a documentary about the heiress of the double-barrel rifle magnate William Winchester. As well as being a documentary the video is also the research that informs the second film Amnesia; A Rehearsal, which is part re-enactment and part improvised performances. Both films are in a sense an exploration of Sarah Winchester and her history, focusing on increasingly obsession into spiritual forces that ultimately consume her life. Sarah Winchester inherited more then she
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probably had aspired to when her father died. Along with vast wealth, she also took it upon herself to feel the burden and guilt, the destruction her fathers invention, the double barrel raffle had caused. With her great inheritance she went on to pursue life according to her impulsive whims, where she conducted sances and to built the Mystery House for 38 long years. Winchester spent all her re configuring her palatial home, in the haphazard way of a woman possessed and became a form of labyrinth, where stairs lead nowhere and doors opened up to nothing.

It is easy to draw the parallel between Sarah Winchester and the artist herself, who in turn becomes fascinated with this character. In some ways Yung undergoes her own possession, reincarnating Winchester, she becomes her and the other characters she meets. She has created her own labyrinth like maze, where the ghost of Winchester haunts every nook and cranny of this space. The compulsive nature in which Yung needs to track and trace the history of all these romantic figures she encounters, is something that she says is her own impulsive need to eat the stories of others. Yung realises Winchester is the key to unlocking the footage she has accrued from her travels and she categories these thematic concerns accordingly into 6 chapters; Death, Love, Present, Journey, Incantation and Architecture. This motif of the space is a crucial element to her practice, in both a curatorial sense and an artistic one. The physical construction of the space determines how the spectator engagement with the work. The end result of a multi channel installation made the aesthetic experience claustrophobic. The artist has admitted that she produced an exhibition format that was compact and there is a potential argument that the show was quite dense. The video times in total come in at approximately 2.85 hours, which would mean a deep commitment for the spectator to engage with the work over a long period of time. Whether it was intentional for the spectator to feel imprisoned in this space in order for them to engage with the themes of the exhibition or to relate to the state of Winchester and her living conditions is left to be undetermined. While on her residency in Sherbourne, Yung visited the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, and she states that this
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became the blueprint for the show. It was intended for it to resemble a history museum, an archival space. In some ways the show has become a preserve for the living and dead fictional and non-fictional people she had encountered, where she has made a fake shrine or temple to these lost people. Alex Hetherington contextualises Yungs interdisciplinary practice by referencing Nicholas Bourriauds texts on the altermodern, and how artists are entering this new age and its relation to globalisation. (1) Hetherington states that her physical trajectory parallels an internalized trajectory exploring fractured identities across time and space and as she films the camera she uses becomes an instrument for time-travel. He determines that Yung uses a conceptual tool, he calls the split device that enables her to communicate between the language of both screen-based documentary and the staged performance, both forms of convention that offer perspectives of truth and artifice. (2) The result is that while Yung has engineered this multi narrative installation, she has also created a multi-identity. She has admitted her primary motivation has been overtly in reference to her Chinese heritage, but this has broadened with time, and she has now found a universal voice. This reinforces Yungs relationship to another Bourriauds examination of the function of the artist in the world, how art reprograms the world: that these works and our appearance in them is entirely abstracted as pure visual material, to be replayed, paused, stopped and tagged. (3) In his book Postproduction, Bourriaud states that: Postproduction artists invent new uses for works, including audio or visual forms of the past, within their own constructions. But they also reedit historical or ideological narratives, inserting the elements that compose them into alternative scenarios. (4) Yung manages to be an exemplary postproduction artist, and this crossdisciplinary project is successful in the sense that is engaging in terms of conceptual content and its aesthetic. It is Yungs intention to continue exhibiting this work and what remains to be seen if it can translate the same themes to a wider audience.

Footnotes 1) Alex Hetherington, Interval; A Narrative Psychosis...As long as the sound of hammers did not cease... http://www.cornerhouse.org/media/Art/Generic%20doc%20and%20sub%20forms/On_KaiOi_Jay_Yung.pdf, pg.1, accessed on January 16th 2011 2) Alex Hetherington, Interval; A Narrative Psychosis...As long as the sound of hammers did not cease... http://www.cornerhouse.org/media/Art/Generic%20doc%20and%20sub%20forms/On_KaiOi_Jay_Yung.pdf, pg.2, accessed on January 16th 2011 3) Alex Hetherington, Interval; A Narrative Psychosis...As long as the sound of hammers did not cease... http://www.cornerhouse.org/media/Art/Generic%20doc%20and%20sub%20forms/On_KaiOi_Jay_Yung.pdf, pg.3 accessed on January 16th 2011 4) Nicholas Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002) pg. 45 Bibliography Alex Hetherington, Interval; A Narrative Psychosis...As long as the sound of hammers did not cease..., http://www.cornerhouse.org/media/Art/Generic%20doc%20and%20sub%20forms/On_KaiOi_Jay_Yung.pdf, accessed on January 16th 2011 Claire Bishop, Participation, (London: Whitechapel and the MIT Press, 2006) Claire Bishop, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents in Art Forum, February 2006, pp. 179-185 Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (France: Les Presses du Rel 2002) Nicholas Bourriaud, The Radicant, (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2009) Nicholas Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002) Paul O.Neill, Curating Subjects, (London: Open Editions, 2007) Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, (London: MIT Press, 2004) Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars N.Nilson (eds.) Taking the Matter into

Common Hands:On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, (London: Black Dog Publishing Limited and IASPIS, 2007) Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture, (Oxon: Routledge, 1994)

Images: Kai-Oi Jay Yung