
To those visitors to the gallery who have told me stories about love, art, ghosts, family, old friends, pets, languages, films, idols, histories, sex jokes… thank you for your generosity and sincerity. I understand it is not easy to trust a stranger, let alone make oneself vulnerable by sharing a story from the dark side.
This project that combines drawing and chatting with visitors has revealed to me that drawing in a public space can empower us to talk about our sense of loss.
So perhaps I should also share with you a personal story told by my mother about her father.
In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, her father, who was a manager of a restaurant next to a cinema in Hainan Island, was condemned as a capitalist roader and sent to a detention unit. For two months, my mother, then a 10-year-old girl, would go to the detention unit every day with two newspapers hidden in cleaned clothes for her father. Newspapers were not allowed in the detention unit, but she would sneak them in and read the daily news and the editorials to her father. Now she recalls that her father predicted the social turmoil would last for a decade. After he was released, he continued to run businesses with his family members. But he had a heart attack and passed away at home in 1983, when I was 1 year old.
The paper scroll installation at the gallery in effect flows like a blank space down onto me so that I may draw. Might one not say it looks like a screen in a cinema? Might not the coffee and tea prepared by me here bring as much joy to visitors as those poured by my grandfather at the restaurant? For two months, I am confined and draw – while he had to write statements of self-criticism.
Now in these times, I have decided to practice bringing people’s thoughts and voices into the drawing, so that the lines and dots could represent fundamental elements of mutual trust and a sense of bonding between the people brought together through love of art.
Come tell me a story!
Exhibition period:
20 August – 26 November 2022
Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 7pm
(my lunch break 1130am – 1215pm)
Address:
Axel Vervoordt Gallery Hong Kong
21F, Coda Designer Centre
62 Wong Chuk Hang Road
Entrance via Yip Fat Street (next to Ovolo Hotel)
Hong Kong
You may walk through the show on the 21st floor and find me on the 22nd floor.
Photography by @felixscimagery on instagram