This exhibition is presented in two iterations. The first, You shall defiantly pass, comprises banner works developed recently while on residency in Athens.  The second iteration, You shall definitely pass, is an immersive bathhouse installation that forms the centrepiece of the project, and was developed during the artist’s Meisterschüler studies in Berlin in 2025. It was shipped from Hamburg shortly before the escalation of conflict between Israel, Iran and the United States. Ongoing disruptions to international shipping have delayed its arrival in Australia.

You shall defiantly pass

Produced during a three-month residency at Yellow Brick in Athens this year, You shall defiantly pass emerged from Min’s engagement with collective care movements, restorative justice practices, mutual aid networks, and communities supporting migrants and individuals experiencing violence in gendered spaces. Responding to what the artist describes as a fractured world shaped by systems of genocide, patriarchy and capitalism, the works explore intentional love, ritual practice, and collective care as forms of resistance. Embedded with experiences of grief, compassion, rage and hope, the banners and text reflect on the capacity of communities to nurture care, healing and transformation.

You shall definitely pass

The research for this project delves into the sauna as a heterotopic space - a site of transformation and resistance where the social body navigates thresholds of privacy and connectivity.  The installation interprets esoteric traditions, rituals, and embodied practices as systems of care. It reimagines spaces that have historically been marginalised or informed by gender, transforming them into active vessels for interrogating dominant and power structures.  

Saunas, locker rooms, changing rooms, and public gyms are symbolic thresholds between private and public domains. These are spaces where the body is rendered simultaneously vulnerable and resistant and becomes a potential site of transformation. By investigating non-binary spaces in architecture, the work explores how bodies can inhabit heterotopic structures as an approach to reconsidering care, intimacy, and new forms of collective solidarity.  The work examines how spaces and adjacent artefacts, once marginal, subversive, and often gendered, can be recontextualised to speak to contemporary themes of relationality, power, and identity politics.

Bio

Min Wong is an Australian sculptor and installation artist. She has shown work in exhibitions around Australia, including at the 2022 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Min was the 2023 Samstag Scholarship recipient, and has participated in numerous international residencies, including most recently in Berlin and Athens. Min grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

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