Talismans for Peculiar Habitats
DATE 2019
MEDIUM Mixed Media Installation; batik, embroidery on unbleached cotton shroud, wax, sandalwood chips, straw, agarwood, incense, clay, paper, ink, benzoin resin, snakeskin, hair, turmeric and sandalwood, spices, manipulated found objects
MEDIUM Mixed Media Installation; batik, embroidery on unbleached cotton shroud, wax, sandalwood chips, straw, agarwood, incense, clay, paper, ink, benzoin resin, snakeskin, hair, turmeric and sandalwood, spices, manipulated found objects
EXHIBITIONS
MoCA, Taipei
PRESS & COMMENTARY
Art Asia Pacific
Stories We Tell To Scare Ourselves With︎︎︎
26 January – 14 April 2019MoCA, Taipei
Between the Living and Archive︎︎︎
9 March – 28 March 2021
Gillman Barracks, SingaporePRESS & COMMENTARY
Review of Between the Living and the Archive︎︎︎
by Louis HoArt Asia Pacific
DESCRIPTION
Talismans for Peculiar Habitats offers a looking glass to the ineluctably peculiar ways we form kinship, are bound to or avert the burdens of bloodlines and the making and breaking of (found) family who construct sustaining communities of comfort and care. The work is marked by the seascapes and spiritscapes that form cumulative coordinates to the artist’s relation to the ambiguous shorelines we call home, and other places we safeguard and return to.
Talismans for Peculiar Habitats offers a looking glass to the ineluctably peculiar ways we form kinship, are bound to or avert the burdens of bloodlines and the making and breaking of (found) family who construct sustaining communities of comfort and care. The work is marked by the seascapes and spiritscapes that form cumulative coordinates to the artist’s relation to the ambiguous shorelines we call home, and other places we safeguard and return to.
The work traces life narratives marked by health crises, mourning, dematerialising home, domesticating doubt and crossing physical-psychical thresholds to seek refuge through imagining communities with strangers. Composed from personal mementos, handwritten notes, small sculptural works, effigies, shrouds, talismanic textiles, trays of offerings and other ritually performed gestures, the installation draws from the voices and fragments from local/regional historiographies of living, dying, surviving and our own personal imaginings of it.
What stories do we tell of final rites, of peculiar phantoms, of ruined / renewed landscapes of isolation / belonging, of time and the chaos of crossing thresholds we might be unfamiliar with? What are the ways to gently observe anyone who has transitioned to other worlds on their own (terms) or the spectres estranged from their bloodline of ancestors?