Lacrimae Rerum

ARC ONE is delighted to start the year with rising talent Cyrus Tang’s first exhibition at the gallery, Lacrimae Rerum.

“There is a rare and honest sensitivity to Cyrus Tang’s practice. A multi-disciplinary artist, she creates a ghostly dystopia of human presence that skirts the periphery of this known world.

Lacrimae Rerum, the title of Tang’s first solo exhibition at ARC ONE Gallery can be translated as “the tears of things”. In Lacrimae Rerum, Tang’s focus is on the collateral damage of man-made wars like the current Syrian War that has given rise to mass migration and homelessness, as well as catastrophic natural disasters, such as the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people and injured close to 23,000.

In her exhibited photographic series, each titled by their long exposure time, Tang captures the demise of a model city as it repeatedly collides with the elemental. Like an omnipotent creator, or conversely a child, she rebuilds the city again and again only to destroy it by fire, heat and flood. The cityscape is fractured and ruined and emphatic of all too familiar images we see in the media of humanity in crisis.

This deep poeticism in Tang’s practice mirrors a universal and visceral stirring in us all. Amongst large scale photography, subtle video and sculptural installations of ash, she traverses the notions of permanence, ephemerality, disappearance, transition and residual memory. Her work raises the paradox of having to exist in order to vanish, as well as the immortal question - what is left when things cease to be? Tang propositions a trace of the former always endures, even if dematerialised.”

• Venita Poblocki, 2016