Where Did All the Water Go?

Water played an unexpectedly central role in Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice. Normally, when we look at an aquarium, we focus on the fish, but in Trevor Yeung’s fishless aquatic installations, the attention shifted to the microsystems that sustain life. Water itself became the main actor—holding everything together, keeping everything alive, as algae and new life quietly grew. More than just a medium, water has its own agency: it carries DNA and minerals specific to each place, subtly changing how ecosystems behave. For example, once we began adding tap water into the works during the installation period in Venice, its cloudy appearance and unexpected mineral buildup from the water caught us off guard. Trevor tried various filters, softeners, and treatments over time in hopes that water would clear up, like the soft water we have in Hong Kong. After many attempts, observation and discussion, we came to realisation that water cannot be controlled.

Keeping that in mind, we approached the response exhibition, Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Detachments, in the bamboo-finished Pao-Watari Galleries not as a replica of the Venice display but as an exciting opportunity for reconfiguration and to further explore the agency and maintenance of water—practically and conceptually along the exhibition’s core themes of attachment and absence. We frequently returned to the idea of time’s acceleration, in relation to the way objects, places, and people trigger memories, as well as the urgent desire to remember or hold onto them. That is, after all, how attachments form. The act of attachment, whether it be to someone or something, is ultimately an act of vulnerability. Attachments can comfort, create dependencies, and shape how we relate to the world. In a city like Hong Kong, where precarity is constant and life moves at a relentless pace, connections can often feel short-lived. The displacement of people and emotions becomes inevitable, intensifying the anxiety of endings.

All 74 aquariums will appear in new configurations in the two gallery rooms. At M+, the once-filled tanks will be emptied of water, leaving only traces of dried flakes of algae and mineral and water stains to hint at their recent use. From a museological standpoint, when objects enter a museum collection—a climate-controlled environment meant to preserve works for future generations—they cease to be functional and become archival, transforming into static monuments of a past life. Suspended in time, Yeung’s haunting fish tanks reflect how excessive care to preserve, regardless of intent, can stifle and lose its original purpose.

In a landscape of fishless, waterless tanks—void of life—what remains are vessels of memory. Yet, complete detachment is an illusion because as relational beings, we do not function in isolation. Our sense of self, survival, and meaning are fundamentally shaped by connections to others, to memories, and to our environments. Like the dried algae in the tanks, even dormant memories are not dead but merely inactive, waiting for water to return.

Pet Shop Boy

Walk into a pet shop in Prince Edward, Hong Kong, and you are confronted with a wall of fish, a densely packed arrangement of aquariums and plastic bags that contain a wide range of vibrant swimming creatures. But what if there were no fish in the pet shop? How would that make you feel? In Venice, Trevor Yeung asks these questions, and in doing so he invites us to reflect on the expectations and social codes that condition the way we relate to one another. In an important sense, social conventions are a natural product of our desire for order, efficiency, and control. However, our emotions make precise, rational calculation impossible. For Yeung, this emotional complexity not only encompasses human relationships, but also extends to the plants and animals that are part of our ecology in the widest sense.

The shops at the intersection of Tung Choi Street and Bute Street in Prince Edward, known as Goldfish Street, have long served as places of inspiration and escape for Yeung. He visits these shops weekly, buying pets and conducting research for his exhibitions. With his profound understanding of botany, horticulture, and aquatic ecosystems, Yeung weaves together deeply personal encounters and astute social observations in intricate sculptures, photographs, and installations. A thread of desire and sentimentality runs through his practice. Like his beloved pet shops, the city of Hong Kong is an enduring reference and source of material, but the emotional resonance of his work and his concern with power dynamics are universal in their scope.

The Joy of Fish

Growing up in Yuen Long, Yeung immersed himself in the study of fish species, microorganisms, and care for aquacultures. He kept small fish as his first pets, like many in his generation in Hong Kong who lived in cramped, high-rise apartments. These crowded living conditions led him to move his aquarium into his bedroom, where he observed the fish daily. Playing with his pets was also a nice distraction from schoolwork. Yeung became captivated by the behaviour of the fish despite their inability to communicate with him in any way. He meticulously observed changes in their colours, measured the temperature and pH level of the water, and continuously fine-tuned the physical environment in the tank. Assuming the role of a caretaker, he intuitively grasped the interdependence between himself and his pets.

For Yeung, always implicit in his unflagging efforts to create the perfect controlled environment for his fish was the question of whether the animals were happy. Turning this question over and over in his mind, he began to see his relationship with the fish as an encapsulation of ambiguity in human relationships. He found a parallel in the ‘Joy of Fish’ dialogue between fourth-century BCE philosophers Zhuangzi and Huizi, in which they debate whether one can truly know the happiness of fish in a river. Zhuangzi observes the swimming fish and proclaims that they are happy. Huizi replies that Zhuangzi is not a fish and therefore cannot know whether the fish are happy, to which Zhuangzi counters that since Huizi is not Zhuangzi, he cannot know if Zhuangzi knows whether the fish are happy. The exchange illustrates how we come to embrace what we believe we know and the limitations of rational inquiry. Logically, it remains impossible to know the happiness of another being. However, interpretations through shared experiences, open communication, empathy, and mutual respect can lead to understanding. As a shy person who often struggles to verbalise his feelings, Yeung found that constructing and caring for micro-ecosystems in fish tanks gave him a way to process conflicts and decipher interpersonal relationships.

Understanding Yeung’s empathy for his pet fish is crucial to the interpretation of the themes and approaches in his artistic practice. Yeung meticulously crafts objects, images, and installations in a poetic and highly controlled, even obsessive, manner. His work examines our desire to exercise control through acts of care. His compositions of organic and manufactured materials, which include living plants, water, ceramics, light, glass, and structural components, are held in balance to illustrate a forced tension between contrasting positions. Caretakers, often working out of public view, maintain the natural materials and living things that make up his installations—just as Yeung himself did for the fish in his childhood bedroom.

In the early years of his career, between 2011 and 2016, Yeung outlined a set of ideas and interests that he has returned to continuously. Examining works from this early period provides a key to reading his exhibition in Venice. For example, Yeung has had an enduring interest in the intersection between private and public spaces. His solo exhibition The Bedroom Show (2012) unfolded within the confines of his own bedroom. Visitors were provided with keys for access, a gesture that strikes an unusual balance between intimacy and anonymous distance. In 2020, Yeung staged another intimate experience in a private apartment, titled there’s something missing, this time coated with pandemic-era feelings of isolation and anxiety. His first aquarium work, titled I am fine, but please don’t disturb me (2011), was included in The Bedroom Show. Teetering on the edge of overflowing, this aquarium conveys the delicate position of a perfectly balanced ecosystem. Yeung developed this concept further in Music Box (bedroom) (2016), a work that recreates the precise arrangement of small fish tanks in his bedroom. This re-enactment refers to a specific moment in his adolescence when he replaced all his books with fish tanks during examination time, contemplating his fish instead of studying. The air pumps in each tank were like musical instruments and surrounded him in a daily symphony. Music box (bedroom) illustrates two important facets of Yeung’s work: a meticulous attention to the function of systems on the one hand, and a deep affection for living things on the other.

Mr. Butterflies (2012), another early work, is an installation consisting of LED lights, a fog machine, turntables, and butterfly palm trees. Viewers can wander leisurely through the tranquil environment as if they were fish in one of Yeung’s aquatic sanctuaries, with the palms recalling the plants—plastic or otherwise—placed at the bottom of a tank. The work’s title implies that each palm tree is an individual entity with a personality. The titles of Yeung’s works often provide clues or starting points for interpretation. For example, He is much better than you think (2012), which features an intricate assemblage of rubber tubing suspended from the ceiling, draws the viewer’s attention to the remarkable way in which air always finds the shortest, fastest route to travel. In Yeung’s framing, this is a metaphor for the simple truth at the core of seemingly complex relationships between people.

Yeung often takes his own biography as a point of departure for his work. The installation Live in Hong Kong, Born in Dongguan (2015) weaves together themes of shame and identity displacement and consists of an aquarium display with diverse species of fish, each with its own complex origin story. Yeung describes their journeys, in some cases illegal, to Hong Kong, shedding light on the global trading network of domesticated animals. The allusion to a fraught cross-border trajectory also refers to Yeung’s own struggle with a sense of belonging as a child born in Dongguan but raised in Hong Kong. This experience, a result of his family’s migration from mainland China in the late 1980s for economic reasons, was shared by many in Yeung’s generation. As visitors to Live in Hong Kong, Born in Dongguan venture through a cave-like opening into the cluster of aquariums, they enter an intimate encounter with the fish and their habitat in Yeung’s introspective world. Emotion, power, and control recur in Yeung’s work but find perpetually new, nuanced expressions.

Courtyard of Attachments

In Venice, Yeung explores sentimentality and relationships of power through the concept of attachment. Here, attachment manifests as feelings of connecting with objects as well as a longing for someone special. Yeung’s presentation articulates his intimate experiences and keen observations of the intricate relationships between humans and aquatic systems, drawing from references including his father’s seafood restaurant, pet shops, feng shui arrangements, and the fish he kept as a child.

Courtyard of Attachments is organised into four installations. Each features fully operational aquariums, complete with filters and accessories, yet devoid of living fish. The palpable sense of absence that saturates the exhibition conjures the cyclical nature of life and the delicate equilibrium of social ecology, which is always susceptible to disorder. The points of transition between rooms are particularly important to this feeling of precarity or impending disruption. These moments are meant to evoke an endless lurching from one unpredictable world event to another, and to underscore the resilience of those in Yeung’s generation who came of age in what can feel like an era of accelerated crisis.

The site-specific work Pond of Never Enough, occupying the courtyard, is a fish tank fountain reminiscent of those found in Chinese seafood restaurants. Inspired by his childhood memories of the changing selection of fish and crustaceans in the display tanks outside his father’s restaurant, Yeung reflects on commodity, consumption, and our relationship with aquatic species. The container at the bottom is made from a breeding pool designed for fish farms. The fishless fountain extracts water from the Grand Canal and filters clean water back into the lagoon, foregrounding the aquatic ecosystem that sustains Venice as well as the role the Biennial plays in the city’s art and tourism economy and its physical infrastructure. The filter system installed at the bottom of the fountain is exposed. Throughout the exhibition period, the fountain is cleaned regularly, drawing attention to the work needed to support these fragile habitats and, by extension, the systems that structure our lives. Alongside the fountain, several self-sustaining gardens of lotus pods are placed throughout the courtyard in an installation titled Mx. Trying-My-Best. Lotus flowers, which are symbols of purity in Chinese iconography, blossom amid landfills and muddy water, which speaks to the plant’s strength and ability to adapt to difficult conditions as icons of hope and determination.

Yeung’s focus on fish tanks as homes for his pets and as containers at seafood restaurants draws attention to two distinct interactions with aquatic life. The same aquarium space serves different ends that coexist, for the artist personally and as touchstones in the culinary and cultural landscape of Hong Kong. Whether we intend to consume or care for the fish, Yeung suggests that our bond with these creatures is moulded by our inclination to shape their confined environment.

Visitors enter the interior of the exhibition space through a reception area whose design is reminiscent of the entrances to small businesses in Hong Kong. Comprising two aquariums and second-hand furniture sourced online, the installation Two Unwanted Lovers blurs the boundaries between decoration, belief, and commerce. Fish tanks and miniature decorations with flowing water are thought to be auspicious and are common ornaments in Chinese businesses. Deconstructing cultural symbols is a recurring aspect of Yeung’s practice, evident in earlier works such as Jia Le Cheng Koi Fountain (2016). In Venice, this interest is manifested in the set of moss- and algae-covered fish tanks, as well as Rolling Gold Fountain, a sculpture featuring rotating spheres that resemble citrines, rare gemstones thought to bring wealth and fortune.

The installations Gate of Instant Love and Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours) investigate the feelings of gratification and excitement that come with taking home a new pet. Fish in the pet shops along Goldfish Street are contained in plastic bags, and the bags are often suspended from hanging systems on the wall. Nestled snugly under the archway of the exhibition venue, Gate of Instant Love invites visitors into a restrained version of a pet shop display, featuring only a few empty bags and S-hooks. The photographic work the stealth that doesn’t hurt/the scratch that doesn’t help echoes the inflated plastic bags on the archway. The image illustrates a broken and used plastic bag that once held water and fish, alluding to the consequences that arise when our innermost desires override thoughtful consideration.

Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours) is an immersive installation that recreates the interior of a pet shop, albeit one devoid of living fish. Encased within a dark room, which calls to mind the depths of the ocean, the installation is illuminated only by the lighting systems of the fish tanks. In pet shops, fish tanks often have coloured lights to enhance the vibrancy of the fish. In his fishless installation, Yeung presents fastidiously crafted landscapes to suggest the types and sizes of fish that might be on offer. Much like his earlier aquarium works, the details of each tank are precisely composed in layers, encompassing decorative elements, air pumps, and a custom breeding apparatus, part of which is made by hand from Hong Kong terracotta. Practical tools like nets and buckets are also integrated into the display. By omitting the fish from the methodically arranged rows of fish tanks, Yeung leads us to reconsider our motivation for creating artificial ecosystems. A closer examination of these vacant containers reveals that the backs of the tanks are mirrored. We might find ourselves replacing the fish in the tanks, inserted into a system that defines our control over another species.

Yeung is a master of posing questions that are allusive and metaphorical but nonetheless explicit. While his cultural references are particular to Hong Kong, parallels with Venice abound, including the way pedestrians move through a dense urban landscape, the proximity to water, and a constant negotiation with a humid climate.

Little Comfy Tornado is the beating heart of Yeung’s presentation in Venice. He conceived this work very quickly and immediately placed it at the physical and conceptual centre of the exhibition. It contains a miniature tornado whirling inside a small fish tank atop a tower of stacked plant stools. The fish tank is connected to a professional-grade filtration system through a network of tubing. The juxtaposition of the modest aquarium with the seemingly excessive support mechanism evokes a sense of unease and invites consideration of the bureaucratic heaviness that often undergirds even the simplest actions in a social system. The rhythmic spinning in the fish tank exudes an air of authority tinged with loneliness and vulnerability. Referring to Yeung’s ongoing Recycled Plinth series, the stools that provide support are crafted with dovetail joints, a feature that leverages an object’s inherent strength and resistance to separation. The installation represents the artist as he navigates large projects within the global art circuit that involve multiple stakeholders and perspectives. At a more personal level, it also illustrates the emotional hurdles of adulthood, specifically of finding a place in the world and forming connections with others against the backdrop of social norms and the mechanisms that operate outside our influence.

Little Comfy Tornado is an extension of the artist’s 2016 work Jacuzzi, which consists of an empty fish tank swaddled in heating strips commonly used to provide tropical fish with a warm, inhabitable environment. Jacuzzi creates a stifling, captive environment and poses a grim dilemma for the absent fish: they could either endure the oppressive heat or leap from the tank to certain death. Little Comfy Tornado’s framing of absence in an atmosphere of vague menace amplifies a line of investigation that Yeung has carried through his work for years, while also inviting new associations about how easily the desire for care and control can spill over into oppression.

Finally, placed discreetly throughout the exhibition space are Night Mushroom in shade (Teak Cabinet) and Night Mushroom Colon (Hong Kong in Venice), small clusters of electric night lamps that resemble mushrooms emerging from the shadows, waiting for visitors to discover them. The longer a visitor lingers in Courtyard of Attachments, the more it becomes clear that there is always something hidden, patiently awaiting a connection. The mushrooms inhabit the space freely, independent of the strict sequence of galleries, their presence seeming to represent the way an entity with no power of its own can survive outside of a rigidly defined system.

In his landscapes of fishless aquariums, Yeung articulates is fascination with artificiality in nature and urban space. Mechanical and decorative accessories are prominently featured in each work to underscore their significance as essential components upholding the delicate, vulnerable equilibrium of an ideal ecology. The relationship between the fish, their caretaker, and a meticulously controlled aquarium is nuanced—whether we find ourselves in the position of the fish, the caretaker, or an inanimate part of the landscape, an attachment to our surroundings, the people around us, and our sense of self inevitably arises. At its heart, this is a yearning to be an irreplaceable, distinctly defined part of something larger than us, an ache to love and be loved.