Ki Nurmenniemi

Man Yau’s Disciplined Beauty 2025

Man Yau’s Disciplined Beauty

An essay by Ki Nurmenniemi, published in 2025 by Tampere Art Museum on the occasion of Man Yau’s exhibition Passage (27.9.2025-11.1.2026). Man Yau was awarded The Young Artist of the Year 2025.

Key ideas informing the essay:

The essay examines the art of Man Yau, whose works function on the edge between the desirable, the painful and the fragile. Yau’s art explores the exoticization and stereotyping of “the Oriental” within Western frameworks, revealing how colonialism and cultural appropriation has shaped social hierarchies. Her refined aesthetic and technical mastery becomes a means to expose these distorted views.

Working with materials such as ceramics, glass, silk, and metal, Yau pushes beauty to the brink of discomfort. Her sculptures – poised between sensuality and danger – uncover how visual pleasure in is intertwined with histories of violence, control and power.

Through works such as M.Y. Chinoiserie (2021), Rosie Wallpaper 01 (2022), Dear Souvenir (2023) and Maze and Barrier (2024), Yau revisits the tradition of chinoiserie ("Chinesery") and colonial ornamentation. She turns decorative motifs into sites of resistance, exposing how femininity, race and “Oriental” aesthetics have been objectified through Western gazes.

Her visual language is meticulously crafted, yet beneath its polished surface lies a sharp critique of how beauty can function as a form of social regulation. The disciplined order of her sculptures becomes a metaphor for the social pressures of othering – for being “on display and under pressure” simultaneously.

Yau’s practice resonates with broader decolonial and feminist discourses. She reclaims materials historically associated with whiteness and purity, subverting their connotations. The result is a striking exposure of how colonial myths persist in contemporary desires and systems of representation. Even the viewer is being challenged: in looking at the works, one is also participating in the orientalizing gaze. Realizing this, these unconsciously learned mechanism might dissolve.

Ultimately, Disciplined Beauty is an inquiry into the fragility of seemingly solid social structures. Beneath control, there are possibilities for transformation – outdated physical, mental and social formal gardens might be made to blossom again into wild meadows.

Young Artist of the Year 2025: Man Yau. Exhibition catalogue. Edited by Aino Nurmesjärvi. Tampere Art Museum.