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Magician Space is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung. Elaborating on new thematic directions, this exhibition explores how human behaviour or unspoken desires can be articulated via living forms, ecological systems, and through artificial and natural structures found in our daily life. Looking to unhinge the viewer from a fixed condition of observation, the exhibition examines the gallery as a system and its symbiotic relationship with human bodies as they enter into an institutional space.

“The Darkroom that is not Dark” unfolds by evoking a milieu of transient and darkened private spaces typically found within public environments. Rooms have been dimmed down, looking to heighten a psychic moment of obscurity – a feeling often felt in enclosures of removed intimacy and when a change occurs in the transition going from one persona into another. Like the seclusion of a photographic room where images appear in the dark; the enclave with a shadow that lurks inside an aquarium; or the hidden room where things considered taboo or suppressed emerge out of their anonymity. There is a dark, secret side to each person’s heart, which harbours deep feelings that cannot always be discussed. What happens if these spaces are no longer in the dark?

Objects such as infrared lamps, heated fish tanks, hybrid roses, and a two-story modified sauna structure, combine in a stage-like setting devised by Yeung to elicit different responses. With regulatory mechanisms borrowed from the world of botanic ecology and aquaculture, the artist adapts their properties to insert new metaphors, conflating these hermetic machines with other systems of human control taken from institutional work hierarchies and forms of surveillance.

In the entryway, viewers are introduced to a set of mirrored lockers. Designed to reflect movement from the surroundings, people are encouraged to remove and store winter garments into the compartments of this installation. Here, a decision is open for viewers to take a further step: to either walk inside the gallery as an impartial observer, or to inhabit a fictitious role in another narrative structure as it begins to gradually develop inside.