a home among the plum trees (2023)

A Home Among the Plum Trees was a solo exhibition held at Fortyfivedownstairs Gallery (Melbourne VIC) on 19-30 September 2023.

A Home Among the Plum Trees is an exorcism of hauntings that resonate across family generations into my past and current life. During 2020, a confluence of critical personal events motivated me to re-evaluate how I saw myself as an individual, the identifications that others projected upon me, and my relationship with others in Australian society. Guided by the photo therapy framework of Jo Spence and Rosy Martin, in conjunction with a material engagement informed by Karen Barad’s agential realism, I approached this self-reflection by engaging with a diverse range of photograph-centred practices throughout 2021 and 2022. Parental and institutional erasures of diasporic heritage, and its replacement with the values of Australian middle-class suburbia and professional status, were critically examined through this multimodal approach.

I began work on this project with preconceived ideas about recovering some form of lost Hong Kong-Chinese heritage – or perhaps reconnecting with a forgotten community that I was separated from during our family’s diasporic trajectory. What emerged through this work eventually revealed my own identity(ies) and cultural position(s) to be more complex, nuanced, and unexpected.