Exhibition text for It Probably Means Lucky, solo exhibition at ZALUCKY:
They say that when you're bad at mahjong, the game is ⅓ skill and ⅔ luck. When you're good at mahjong, the game is ⅔ skill and ⅓ luck. Regardless of the best laid plans, there's always a big component of chance. As such, many of the customs that surround the game involve supernatural ways of respecting and increasing one’s good fortune: choosing the right location for the table, aligning its corner diagonally to the walls, randomizing who gets to sit facing the door, or washing your hands after a bad round.
This culture of seeking signs of auspiciousness in our everyday lives carries through Cantonese puns, patterns, and geomancy. The colour of a shirt, the time to wash hair, the position of chopsticks, the direction of a picture frame, the words above a door, or the sharpness of a building play a role in determining one’s fortune. And for the diasporas of the last century, luck is often cited as the factor that led them across oceans. Lucky to be here, lucky to be alive. Conversely, these sentiments are also used against migrant peoples to accept worse conditions. Already lucky to be here, already lucky to be alive.
Sometimes, luck is manufactured, like the bilingual fortune cookies made at Wing Noodles’ factory. Last year, I worked with JIA Foundation to document their closure after 128 years of operation as a pillar of Montreal Chinatown’s community. The neighbourhood’s spirit carries on in family businesses, community gardens, clandestine dance studios, martial arts clubs, language schools, and parks. It was during times of change that rival clan associations would perform a lion dance blessing together. Lettuce littered the streets.
About the fabric books:
This series of fabric books taking a closer look at the productive role of absence in archives, through the creation of textile books about second-hand memory and unknown inheritance in my Chinese-Vietnamese family.
How do we reframe the yearning to find missing images into a space of potential? Diasporic storytelling often finds itself in the gaps of second-hand memory: stories that might be retold slightly—or completely—differently depending on the listener, the preparation, the trust, and even the weather. Instead of looking for evidence of a singular truth, I want to create vessels that can contain multiple absences and contradictions, in recognition of the very human unreliability of recollection.
Through fragmentary accumulation, I will center my material exploration on found objects, misprints, and scraps from my studio and scans of my grandparents’ remaining photo albums to create three fabric books. Instead of looking primarily at the subject of the photographs, I will be focusing on the containers’ personal structures: scrapbooking techniques, marginalia, personal notes, and bookmarks. I take inspiration from Louise Bourgeois’ 2002 edition of ‘Ode à l’oubli’ (translated from French as ‘Ode to Forgetting’), a book of lithography on textile and fabric collages, sourced from the artist’s wedding six decades earlier. Simultaneously an homage to—and an exorcism of—nostalgia, Bourgeois’ work demonstrates how encyclopedic formats can be imbued with personal affect across more than half a century.
