Man Mei To (b.1990) obtained her Bachelor degrees in Arts from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT) and Hong Kong Arts School in 2017, majoring in painting. Her artworks incorporate various media such as painting, photography, video, sound, installation, and mixed media.
Man’s artworks tell the stories on the basis of the materials, with the employment of different techniques and media. She often sees the exhibition space as her painting canvas, the materials as the colours, for executing cross-media and experimental works. Her artistic practice typically engages the “the body” and “the city”. She consciously carries her sensitivity of searching body intimacy to explore the landscape in the city, urbanized life, fading scenarios, and vanishing objects within the cityscape. Her works aim to raise awareness of “his” existence, and the dialogue between “his” fragility and “his” silence by objectifying, cloning, reconstructing, and quantifying found objects and reconstructing the trace of existence from the fragments of the objects. She hopes to find a closed relationship between the land and our body through her art practice, until reaching a natural state for both to exist.
Man has initiated her solo exhibitions from 2016, including “Laundry Shop” ( A walk with A3, Hong Kong, 2016 ), “The Distance of Space” (Floating Projects, Hong Kong ,2018 ), and “Sediment and Undercurrent” (ACO Art Space, Hong Kong). She also has rich experience of local and international exhibition showcases, including “Primitive Sense Art festival” (Omachi City, Nagano, Japan, 2016 ), “Ensemble” (VT Artsalon, Taipei, 2017 ),”Zoo as Metaphor (2)” (Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, Hong Kong, 2018), “Big wind blows” (Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong, 2020 ), “The Spaces Between the Words Are Almost Infinite” (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2020), etc.
In addition to artistic creation, she has also curated and founded different art-related communities and events. She recently co-curated “A Page A Wish” in 2019-2020, a series of community art projects on the theme of food at Oi!, which aims to let the public experience the possibility of integrating art and life. In 2016, Man established “The Mother Tuck Shop” in HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity and worked there as a food educator/chef. Back then, Man participated in kick-starting various projects in the northern part of Hong Kong. In 2013, she co-founded “Local Made Productions” and “Field Side Stories”, which document the development of land, struggles, art, and changes in the lives of villagers in Northeast New Territories. She also co-founded “To Yau” in 2015, a living practice space in Wah Shan Village, Sheung Shui, for urbanites to reflect on the existence of urban-rural coexistence.