An Art Gallery of Ballarat exhibition
Yellow Peril is a body of work that explores the historical and ongoing impact and influence of mining and immigration on Australian identity. Comprising video, screen-printed mylar blankets and sculpture, an archival image of the artist’s parents posed in front of Ron Robertson-Swann’s infamous public artwork Vault (1980), aka ‘Yellow Peril’, is the starting point for Eugenia Lim’s performative and playful exploration of Chinese presence in Australia. The first in Lim’s Ambassador trilogy, Yellow Peril features Lim as a gold Mao-suited ‘Ambassador’ sent back in time to the Australian goldfields of the 1850s – an era of ‘gold-diggers’, xenophobia and the White Australia Policy. What has changed and what remains? Inspired by the observational comedy of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Yellow Peril explores the evolving dynamics between Australia and China, and the interconnected nature of our socio-economic future; the personal and political search for wealth, identity and socio-economic power. 

BIOGRAPHY
Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese-Singaporean descent who works across video, performance and installation to explore how national identities and stereotypes cut, divide and bond our globalised world. Her work has been exhibited internationally at festivals and venues including the Tate Modern, Dark MOFO, ACCA, Melbourne Festival, Next Wave, GOMA, ACMI, firstdraft, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), FACT (Liverpool) and EXiS Seoul. She has been artist-in-residence with the Experimental Television Centre NY, Bundanon Trust, 4A Beijing Studio and the Robin Boyd Foundation. She is a 2018–2020 Gertrude Contemporary studio artist and in 2019, is the co-director of 25-year-old artistic company APHIDS. The Ambassador is a major tour of Lim’s recent work.

She is the co-writer and host of ABC iView’s Video Becomes Us, an artist-made series on Australian video art.