Installation view courtesy of Gordon Stillman
Charles Addams Gallery, Philadelphia
Ways of Speaking
2018-2019
Photographs, text, found images, objects
Dimensions variable
In Ways of Speaking (2018-2019), I assemble photographs and words to map the threads of my experiences with queerness, family, and diaspora. I explore different ways that we communicate knowledge, experience, and intimacy: through coded vocabularies, through a photograph, through silence at the dinner table.
I am interested in expressing things that often remain unsaid in various contexts (familial, subcultural, etc.). Through a mixture of formal and snapshot-style photography, I explore cultural customs, language, and gestures that make me feel alternatively closer or further from my roots as a Chinese American and/or my identity as a queer woman. 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.