Measuring Project: Chapter One
Yee I-Lann, Malaysian, born 1971
2021
Digital inkjet pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper
6/8, +2 AP
Sheet: 13 11/16 × 18 9/16 in. (34.8 × 47.2 cm)
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased through the Mrs. Harvey P. Hood W'18 Fund and with a gift from Kaavya Viswanathan and Joshua Lewin, Class of 2011
2024.18.1a-d
Geography
Place Made: Malaysia, Southeast Asia, Asia
Period
21st century
Object Name
Research Area
Asia
Photograph
Not on view
Inscriptions
Signed and inscribed, on reverse, bottom left to right, in graphite: 6/8 "Measuring Project: Chapter One" / Yee I-Lann. 2021.
Label
The artist Yee I-Lann is featured in this image alongside three performers, challenging hierarchies embodied in everyday furnishings through their interaction with the mat. In Southeast Asian indigenous cultures, the mat represents a platform for gathering, where community members sit together as equals. Traditionally, mats were crafted using a local system in which weavers measured the materials with their feet. Honoring this practice, the performers here use their bodies as measuring tools, lying and sitting at the mat’s edges to integrate themselves into the structure of the whole. Performed as a ritual, Yee’s celebration of the mat challenges the contemporary dominance of the table, which systematically replaced the mat in Southeast Asia following colonization by the Portuguese and Spanish.
From the 2025 exhibition Weaving as Method: Intertwining Postcolonial Narratives in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, curated by Haely Chang, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Associate Curator of East Asian Art
Provenance
The artist, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia; Silverlens Galleries, New York, New York; sold to present collection, 2024.
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