26 October – 18 November 2000.

Curator: Melissa Chiu
Artists: Wong Hoy Cheong (Malaysia) and Rea
Catalogue available in the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art library.

Gallery 4A [4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art] is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring Malaysian artist Wong Hoy Cheong and Australian urban Indigenous artist Rea, as the first exhibition and international project to be held at Gallery 4A’s new premises at the Corporation Building.

Poisonous Targets engages with ideas of cultural diversity and multiculturalism from two very different and culturally specific vantages, seeking to complicate and question the common understanding of the term.

Wong Hoy Cheong is one of Malaysia’s most prominent artists, whose practice involves drawing, installation and performance to explore issues central to his cultural identity. In Poisonous Targets, Wong uses botanical materials such as tomato, tobacco, coconut, papaya, tapioca and tea, which are both indigenous and introduced species to Malaysia, to create masks moulded from the faces of different ethnic groups that make up Malaysia to examine ideas of social history and migration.

Rea is a well respected Indigenous artist whose practice has consisted of photographic and digital imaging as a means of exploring her grandmother’s experience as a stolen child. There issues are important not only to her own experience of Aboriginality, but also significant to a wider understanding of the multicultural experience in Australia.