Nathan Man is a Hong Kong artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. Working across installation, printmaking, and object-based practice, their work examines the slippages between language, identity, and cultural translation within diasporic and queer experience.
ACTS OF SERVICE is an installation combining sculptural and interactive elements in order to examine the position of racialised bodies in service roles. The project explores how this position extends beyond labour into sexuality, social relations, and modes of survival. Building upon the restrained materiality and institutional critique of HOLDING ROOM (2025), this work engages the racialised body directly by considering how Western culture and institutions contort the “other” into vessels of service, desire, and endurance.
The installation features a full-body sculpture of a human figure posed as a table, viewed through a pane of switch glass that alternates from clear to matte as the viewer approaches. This tension between revelation and concealment underscores the objectification of racialised bodies while asserting their agency to evade visibility. The use of glossy industrial materials contrasts the softness of the human body, highlighting the friction between embodiment and commodification. ACTS OF SERVICE situates the racialised, queer body as both object and agent, contorted into a vessel of service yet resisting sustained inspection—a reflection on survival, desire, and refusal.
