Reciprocal Space is an online collaborative residency and cultural exchange between Malaysian-based artist Lee Mok Yee and UK-based artist Laura Porter, who both work in sculpture and installation
Lee Mok Yee is a Malaysia visual artist born in Klang, a port town near the capital city, Kuala Lumpur, where he currently lives and works. A graduate of first the Dasein Academy of Art and later from the Fine Art program at the Middlesex University of London, Mok Yee is an artist whose work is primarily concerned with the entanglement between the conceptual and the material.
His work is process-focused and often interrogative of the aspect of ‘materials’ in art-making, choosing to work with ready-made or store-bought objects. Mok Yee re-arranges these materials as an act of interrogation against uniformity; pushing against the boundaries of function in mass-production, and in the re/arranging he questions the idea of moving within structures as an exploration of change and its futilities.
Inspired by man-made structures in states of flux, Laura's work deals with themes of development and decay, the dual presence of which forms a critique of productivity against the backdrop of a growing, global eco-consciousness. Just as increased productivity erodes the very resources upon which it relies, the repetitive processes in her practice abrade the materials within the works calling into question the recycled systems that humankind perpetually develops in the pursuit of progress.
Often letting chance encounters and circumstance dictate the choice of material, Laura's practice uses found and repurposed materials gathered from her immediate environment; discarded clothing of local people, or piles of liquidated contents from buildings under construction. Working with found materials, she unpicks the systemic arrangements and regularly repeated patterns that regulate life; from the relentless industrial production of the man-made, to the repetitive craft processes created within our domestic environments; employing unconventional processes developed in response to the items in use.
© Lee Mok Yee
© Laura Porter