Recipient of the Australian Print Workshop Award.
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MIGRATIONAL DISPLACEMENT
Ongoing complexities that surround the possibility of a posthuman period bares witness to generational migrational displacement and the breakdown of psychological and cultural identity. The aim of this project throughout has been to discover and break down how migrational displacement takes place and will increase in a period of hyper-globalisation and anthropogenic change. As a second-generation migrant, my own experience as an Asian-Australian is highlighted with the colour yellow persisting throughout this body of work. Yellow inherently presents itself with connotations of race relations, but moreover, it suggests ‘asian’ as a slur, objectified as a colour to differentiate culture and being. Australia has a long succession of a racist culture that is spread in history and media. In removing the mess that surrounds yellow, this project analyses the colour positioned within desolate spaces, vacant lands, and minimalist constructions to highlight and reclaim it as a colour of empowering identity. Experimenting with installation and printmaking, the project evolved into specifying how racial identification sits within dimensional spaces, becoming subject to a rapidly expanding global community where individuals are forced to feel displaced.
Michael Lye is an Asian-Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Working in both the digital and traditional printmaking fields, his work discusses race and philosophical and scientific explorations through the use of playfully abstract and minimalistic formations. Either blissfully colourful or grotesquely visceral, Lye builds upon his own position as a multi-race artist to discuss the background stereotypes towards minorities in society, whilst focusing on generational displacement and its consequential environmental impacts.
