Satur Chong

Born Malaysian and ethnically Chinese(2001), I was mainly grew up in Melaka, a small, historic and multicultural town in Malaysia, also spending some of my early years in Shanghai, China. From 2019-2022 I was partially trained as a jeweller at Sheffield Hallam University, flushed and thrown into the experience of entering a niche game of reevaluating objects and redefining the conceptual boundaries of jewellery. When I look back, what I took from the contemporary jewellery world is its mocking self-reflection. So this is the way I create, or better saying a stray, as a constant reflection of the sensible contemporaneity with a pinch of humour. During the masters degree, my interest and practice touches the realm of public art and have been involving in events such as the KCAW public art trail. Recent work includes sculpture, performance, photography and other interdisciplinary art forms---but I admire capers to secretly considering that they can still be a piece of jewellery.

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Degree Details

I am filling up my recent series Plottery (1)(2)(3) with humorous-tone collages that tend to lead a leap between comfort and disgust, noble and nasty, decent and awkward, wealth and poverty, determinism and relativism, individualism and collectivism, life and death. I see a montage of these leapingly contradictory issues as collapsing the established distance between them to enter an intense zone of unveiling. In a parallel way, the absurdity of the revelation results in rejuvenating laughter that comforts our unstable living phase. So mischievousness manifests in its face of a profoundly childish restorer.

I drink tea on the manhole cover. Make wafer using water stopcock on street. Smoking foot with an erotic high heel pipe. Furniturized. Forming a multi-people entity. Incarnated into a man nequin to display jewellery. And more.

Through the objects I casted myself into different roles. Like a bucket of hot liquid metal flows into mould, how rashly and enthusiastically is human body and will follow and developed by the objects in hand (or on head, on neck, on feet). Where it comes to a provocation that the intention of those artefacts is unavoidably suspicious, with indefinable criticizing attitude or a secret sweet dwell in obsession. That its coverage of plot is fragile yet unbroken.

Annotation:

(1)Plot: a secret intention, a plan that hasn’t been executed, a potentiality, an accumulation of intelligence

(2)Plot twist : a dramatic surprise element, an entertainment, a trick to please the audience by playing the fool

(3)Pottery: the container of meaning or the emptiness of meaning, a fragile surface, an artefact, a tool, a coherent wall which is mutually defined by the force of the inner doctrine and the outer appearance

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Smoking a foot with an erotic high heel pipe. This object densely infused with desire comments and satirises towards the stereotyped sexual characters as well as the association between foot fetishism and the satisfaction of status disparity in sadomasochism.

Beyond or still entrapped in the model of sexual relationship, the film casting the artist's masculine and feminine roles with fluid emotion cutover within each scenes unfold the dizziness and narcissist sensuality of polarized identities within one self.

Medium: Silver, wood, plastic, paint, second-hand high heel

Size: 310x180x150mm

Street Food - Wafter Maker

Humorous association between the water stopcock cover ubiquitously found on London street and a wafer maker speaks to the universal materiality of mass-produced everyday objects ‘from kitchen to street, all metal from a similar mould’ (with the subtle change of T and F seen in the inscription) as well as triggering the sensitive tension between disgust and hygene.

Dishwasher

Flushed with flowing water, cleaner or dirtier. This work portrays a naive and inaccurate sympathy towards the unimagined daily life on street of the homelessness.

Roll out from Home!

Toilet paper. When this personal, domestic, essential existence being kicked out and rolling from home to the street, it is thrown into a situation to disguise and merge into the unfamiliar road by imitating the road marking line. At the meantime, consumed.

Embrace

Wearing the double yellow line road mark necklace, a fragile individual’s physicality is exposed to the undetermined road, in absurd, pragmatic contrast with her ownership towards it. To embrace life is to be embraced by its uncertainty, danger and risk. In the extremity and fundamentality, to embrace the death.

Manhole Tea Chat

'The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definite form.' ------ Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

It comes to a point that the manhole cover, for me, has becomes a symbol of coverage of all those secrets and prohibitions hidden underneath the city that we used to step under our shoes with ignorance.

Look down, my friend.

This manhole tea set symbolises lifting up the covered dirty water under the city to the visible level of people's live, to be poured out, sipped right onto the tongues and enter their conversation. With tea ritual, which always being the invitation and catalyst of an intimate chat, it serves as a gentle provocation of the right of speech and knowledge of something untold, unknown, unspoken within the public sphere.

The performance has taken part in the KCAW public art trail 2023.

Medium: Metal

Size: 600x600x200mm

The centipede film — The performance of 5 people wearing a long, connected hat walking seriously on streets as a multi-people entity reflects phenomenon of humanity alienated into character of insects. Walking in line, our weak limbs moving on a single trajectory which follows the collective will.

Medium: Textile

Size: 1500x240x150mm

Standing solemnly at the entrance of the government ministry, I was wearing a hat stand-hat to welcome and serve the visitors. As a parody of the relationship between government and the people, hat represents job, status, and responsibility. While the materiality of a wooden furniture satires the natural tendency towards decay and corruption when detached from the context for serving its people and being looked after.

Medium: Wood

Size: 290x250x90mm

Underflag — Old flags fading away with nostalgic last glance of its sublime. Above the sky our flimsy underwear hanging. Gender. Privacy. Entertainment. Emotion. Identity. Should we celebrate that the personal becomes the politic?

Bald Hat — Bowler hat has a deep-rooted cultural linkage with the identity of specific gender, race and status. Besides the mischievous play between decent and awkward, covering and unveiling, sociological and biological characteristic of the term ‘gentleman‘, the hidden feminine materials symbolically hinted that woman is gradually escaping and revealing from the shedding patriarchy world.

Medium: Woman hair, silicone bra, vintage bowler hat

Size: 290x250x170mm

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us, said Kafka. A book is also an axe which splits and deconstructs itself into endless layers of sheets with the equal force it used to be waved towards the world. A book is also a body who murdered and born by the axe, from the tree into the library. A book is an axe.

Medium: Secondhand book(Naomi Jacob, The Morning Will Come), wood

Size: 100x210x30mm

(With that ridiculous small sound generated when you touching the shiny, smooth polished surface) bringing unconsciousness to a sense of guilty, the golden remote control mocked the owners of this precious metal: possession of gold is a control towards the remote gold mining labours.

Medium: Gold (prototyped)

Size: 160x60x30mm

Anti ornamentalism. Anti marriage. Anti relationship. Anti shiny. Anti consumerism. Anti love. Anti fairy-tale. Anti precious metal. Anti wealth. Anti commitment. Anti lie. Anti dream. Anti elegant. Anti mining. Anti sex. Anti pearl. Anti humancentric. Anti bourgeois. Anti formalism. Anti gazing. Anti body constraint. Anti tradition. Anti fashion. Anti ritual. Anti monogamy. Anti emotional. Anti stereotype. Anti eternity. Anti domineer. Anti serious. Anti luxury. Anti gift. Anti westernization. Anti possession. Anti value. Anti upper class. Anti religion. Anti patriarchy. Anti family. Anti entice. Anti property. Anti narcissistic. Anti jewellery. Anti desire. Anti decoration. Anti advertisement. Anti noble. Anti design. Anti vanity. Anti surprise. Anti narrative. Anti show off. Anti romantic. Anti meaning. Anti diamond. Anti interpretation.

Medium: silver, zircon, pearl, vintage jewellery case

Size: 55x55x80mm, 70x70xx110mm