Beachcomber Magazine 04

KimYip Tong REVIVING NATURE RÉANIMER LA NATURE Playing with art and technology, Kim Yip Tong peacefully campaigns to reconquer the heart of nature on her island. She extols nature in her hardy paintings, radiating videos and revealing installations. Kim Yip Tong, jouant entre art et techno, lutte tout en douceur pour reconquérir la nature profonde de son île. Elle l’exalte dans ses tableaux vivaces, ses vidéos irradiées et jusqu’au cœur d’installations révélatrices. I n Tamarin, behind a fence opposite the Salines is a hidden bay, as idyllic as a mirage. The water laps Yip Tong’s houses between basalt rocks and the Indian Ocean. AN ADVENTUROUS GIRL Barefoot on the sharp grass, Kim weaves her way through the flowering shrubs under the shiny leaves. She flits around the family home where she lives and works in a wacky outhouse made of grooved wooden boards and sheet metal, daubed in red and white. It is a charming refuge for a lady explorer searching for the lost forests that haunt her life and her paintings. There is a little nostalgic elf hidden inside this vibrant young woman, helping her confront the threat to nature in Mauritius. Nature that impregnates all the facets of her work while she busies herself planting and protecting the most vulnerable endemic species in her garden. Daughter of an intrepid Mauritian music producer of Chinese origin who fell in love with a German woman, our adventurous girl considers herself creole and flourishes under the Croix du Sud, wreathed in moonlight. As a child, she loved dressing her dolls in scraps of fabric, leading to a genuine interest in textiles and taking her abroad to study them in greater detail in the fog of London and the drizzle of Paris. She returned to Mauritius aged 26 with a whole raft of qualifications under her belt: a Master’s degree in Information, Experience and Design from the Royal College of Arts and a B.A. in Textile Design from Central Saint Martins which followed on from an Applied Arts course at the École Olivier-de-Serres in Paris. NATURE AT WORK Buoyed by her new knowledge, she returned home where she decided to bring the seashores of her childhood back to life through artistic activism. Conscious of the fragility of these places where tourism has emerged triumphant, she laments the disappearance of the stars in the night sky in one of the wonderful written texts that often accompany her paintings. She writes: “ A duvet of a million brightly lit spots shone down on me as I grew up, then the electric halos made the sky fade. I no longer watch the sky at night – there’s no reason to look at an empty painting. ” Her paintings vibrate with dazzling visions of entangled roots, stems, branches and twigs reaching up to touch the sky and weaving webs of underwater sea creatures. She creates wonders to muffle the echoes of the colonial era and make room for the voice of a fragile heritage to be heard. She spends entire days and nights in her studio in Tamarin, painting and bringing to life tales in which plants that are rarely passive fight and defend themselves, sometimes hiding away on the slopes of misty mountains. Rain in the form of coloured drops rolls down canvases as she blows, BY JEAN-PASCAL BILLAUD PHOTOGRAPHS CLAUDE WEBER 