Working across bronze, porcelain, and glass, Helsinki-based artist Man Yau creates sculptures that interrogate racialized aesthetics, gendered labor, and the coded language of materials. In this conversation, she looks back on a whirlwind (ongoing) year of exhibitions, from Kiasma to Liste and Riga Contemporary. She reflects on art fairs as spaces of both opportunity and tension, and considers how her practice engages with structures of racialized labor and the often hollow rhetoric of care within contemporary institutions.
Hello Man, lovely to sit down with you to have a chat. Thank you for finding the time. How are you doing, and what are you up to at the moment?
Thanks for inviting me. Things are hectic right now. I'm working on a two-floor museum show for the Young Artist of the Year exhibition, which opens in September at the Tampere Art Museum. It's a big deal in Finland—though maybe not so well known abroad. The nomination comes with a nice stipend and a full solo show. That sounds great, right? But I only had nine months to prepare, which is much tighter than usual. I found out while still in a residency in Copenhagen, so it’s been nonstop since then.
1. Faux Bone China, 2024Photo: Stanislav Stepashko
2. Bow Boots, 2024Photo: Stanislav Stepashko
3. Self-portrait 01, 2024Photo: Sakari Tervo
This summer alone, your work’s been on view at Kiasma, with recent shows at Pitted Dates and Temnikova & Kasela, plus appearances at Liste in Basel and Riga Contemporary. Sarah Thornton once likened art fairs to slaughterhouses, stripping artworks of intimacy in favor of market exposure. Yet they’re essential for networking. Now that you’ve both shown and attended two fairs back-to-back, what’s your take?
It’s still something I’m processing. Liste and Riga were my first fairs ever. I’ve always seen myself more as an institutional artist—maybe that’s not the right word—but I’ve preferred working with museums and off-spaces where there isn’t the pressure to sell. So starting work for these fairs wasn’t particularly inspiring at first. But I was really lucky with both Olga (from Temnikova & Kasela) and Sakari (from Pitted Dates). They’re genuinely interested in the ideas behind the work, not just what might sell.But yes, of course, the commercial context creates friction. There’s always that tension between authentic artistic expression and commercial expectations. Still, Liste, for example, paid my studio rent for the rest of the year—so it’s hard to dismiss the value entirely. The networking was also eye-opening. Finnish galleries rarely participate in high-level fairs like Liste, so I had many conversations where people asked, “Why don’t we see more Finnish artists here?” I didn’t really have a good answer. Maybe it's a cultural or social thing (we tend to keep our wealth low-key), or maybe due to how little we talk about the art market in Finnish art schools.
At Riga Contemporary you showed HARDENER from your Peep Show series—bronze feet with toe separators resting on a towel. The work evokes hierarchies in service labor, particularly in nail salons where class, race, and gender dynamics intersect. What sparked this series, and how are you thinking through these visual cues?
Peep Show is the series I’ve been developing for the Tampere Art Museum show. HARDENER is one of three pieces, and it centers on what I call “silent violence”: forms of harm or exoticization that aren’t loud but are very much embedded in social experience. It’s not just about nail salons, but that’s a strong visual and sensory reference. The smell of acrylics, the posture, the labor—all that ties into a memory I have, like being outside my building and having a neighbor yell at me to “shut down the nail salon,” assuming I worked there because I’m Asian. From there, I started building the work with my own body as reference, molding my own feet, embedding tiny images of myself into the porcelain toenails. These images show me in sexualized poses but twisted—my body is caged in the shape of toenails. I was thinking a lot about how certain sensory cues, like smell, can racialize or reduce someone. So in this piece, I’m literally the surface, the screen, the spectacle.
Man Yau, Peep show, installation at Tampere Art HARDENER 02, 2025.
Have you read Ocean Vuong’s “The Emperor of Gladness”?
No, but it's on my reading list! People have told me the themes really align with Peep Show. I’ll definitely get to it once the show is installed.
Visibility—being seen, categorized, and often misunderstood—is a recurring theme in your work. How do your material choices speak back to those dynamics, especially as a woman and BIPOC artist?
My materials always come from personal experience. In the HARDENER piece, I knew I had to use bronze because of its history in traditional sculpture, it carries that weight of “importance.” Then porcelain, because of its decorative, imperialistic and orientalist baggage. There’s this dissertation I read about racial coding in porn, and “porcelain” is a term often used to describe Asian women, literally objectifying them as material. White women are described in more humanizing ways, like “happy girl,” while Asian women become commodities: pearls, porcelain, silk. So using porcelain nails wasn’t just aesthetic; it was conceptual. That’s how my brain connects material with meaning.
Man Yau, works from 2011–2025.Tampere Art Museum, 2025.
How does exhibiting internationally shift or inform the political readings of your work? Are audiences responding differently depending on the context?
Definitely. For example, I created a piece called M.Y. Chinoiserie. The title is a play on my initials, but it can also be read as “my,” suggesting a shared experience. The work explores the European decorative style that imitated the aesthetics of the East — essentially, the European version of the “idea of the East.” In Finland, where we don’t often talk about European colonial history, the piece can be a bit abstract. But when I showed it in London, people immediately understood the references—because Chinoiserie, strongly rooted to Britain’s history too, is everywhere in their architecture, art and design. I always learn so much from how different audiences read the work.
Man Yau, Rosie Wallpaper 02,Tampere Art Museum, 2025.
M.Y. Chinoiseire,Tampere Art Museum, 2025.
You work with labor-intensive forms like ceramics, glass, and casting—mediums historically coded as “craft” and feminized. Do you see that as a feminist gesture?
I do. My dream is to work slowly and by hand, even though it limits what I can say yes to. Sometimes fairs invite you last minute, and I can’t just rush out a cast bronze in two weeks. But I refuse to compromise on the process.As for feminism—I identify as feminist, yes. But I don’t necessarily see it as radical to weld or cast bronze as a woman. I wish we didn’t think of strength-based materials as male to begin with. It still pisses me off that I have to prove my knowledge at hardware stores to be taken seriously. So yeah, maybe it’s feminist. But mostly I’m trying to unhook materials from gendered assumptions altogether.
Do you see care as a conceptual tool—especially in relation to the affective labor expected from racialized or femme bodies?
That’s such a tough one. Honestly, I’m tired of institutions using “care” as a buzzword. It shows up in every press release, but rarely in the actual working process. Especially when you’re making vulnerable work, art that comes from lived trauma, it can feel exploitative when the institution doesn’t support you as a human being. They want the object that talks about objectification, while objectifying you in the process.If care is really at the heart of curating, then we need to see it practiced, not just stated. Care should extend to how the artist is supported emotionally and practically when making and showing personal work.
Some recent trends—like shows designed for online circulation via platforms like O Fluxo or KubaParis—can feel performative, even if visually strong. What’s your take? Are there directions in contemporary art you’d like to see evolve—or end?
I think we’ve already seen those platforms peak. Back in 2019, they felt exciting. But now the feed is just too much. People are tired. Fewer artist-run spaces even bother submitting documentation anymore. It’s become saturated.As a sculptor, I find it especially tricky. If the final version of the work is just an image, then materials become props. It encourages surface-driven decisions instead of process-based ones. Also, bodily presence matters to me. My works ask you to walk around them, get close, sense their weight and smell. A JPEG just doesn’t translate that.That said, I understand why people play to the image. You might only get 100 people at your physical show, but an image online can reach thousands. Still, I’m hoping and I already see that we are shifting toward slower, more intimate engagement again, away from the hype cycle of the algorithm.
INTERVIEW: Lilian Hiob-KüttisPHOTOGRAPHY: Silver Mikiver