Alina Wang

Installation view courtesy of Gordon Stillman

Charles Addams Gallery, Philadelphia

Ways of Speaking

2018

Photographs, text, found images, objects

Dimensions variable

“Intimacy is our only home.”

– Junot Diaz

These assembled photographs, words, found images, and objects together map the complex threads of my experiences with queerness, family, and diaspora. I explore different ways that we communicate knowledge and experience: through coded vocabularies, through a photograph, through silence at the dinner table.

I am interested in expressing the things that often remain unsaid in familial contexts. Through a mixture of formal and snapshot-style photography, I explore cultural customs, language, and experiences that make me feel alternatively closer or further from my roots as a Chinese American. I retell a moment with my mother where I learned about a Chinese superstition. It’s considered unlucky for two people to share a pear: they will end up apart. The words in Mandarin for “to share a pear” and “to separate” sound the same. Through this example of passed down cultural knowledge, I weave the distances, the unspoken, the knowledge carried in one space but not another.