Filtering by Category: exhibition
Endowment (2024) and Cyanide Debt (2025) exhibiting at Art Museum, University of Toronto
https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/dwelling-under-distant-suns/
Two projects are being exhibited in the exhibition “Dwelling Under Distant Suns” curated by Simon Yantong Li. The exhibition runs from September 4 to December 20, 2025.
Endowment (2024) and its accompanying words will be exhibited to the public for the first time at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. I am curious about how this work, made at Penn and in the wake of tumultuous student protest and its university repression, can find resonance at the University of Toronto (UofT). UofT also experienced student and faculty protests in 2023/2024 but to a different extent and its context different than the United States and its political administrative changes. Cyanide Debt (2025) was commissioned by the curator Simon Yantong Li. The video work was filmed on March 2025 when Penn students went to Bangkok and Chiang Mai for field work and research in the two cities.
Calcium Breather at Hunt Gallery in Toronto
https://huntgallery.info/Calcium-Breather-final
Calcium Breather a solo exhibition at Hunt Gallery in Toronto, runs from June 06 to July 03, 2025.
With great resolve, the exhibition brought together two anchoring artworks from my time at Penn, the video Corals of Bidong and Camp Atlanta.
Ration Eater and the closing of a chapter
My Ration Market project took on a new development in its Ration Eater iteration. The artwork was presented at The Plumb in a show curated by Callum Schuster, called “On a Table, Over Time”.
Ration Eater features a sculpture as well as a tasting event wherein guests can eat an actual bowl of the rau muong/ river spinach-ration congee that was advertised for sale in my Ration Market Special sculpture. The food that was served is a simple congee made with salt, water, and jasmine rice, that is then topped by a slurry of blended rau muong and then garnished with fried shallots. For me, the work was a way to bring the fiction of Ration Market further into life. At the tasting event, guests were encouraged to bring their own bowl and spoon, which for me as an artist, generates a mise-en-scene of a provisional sharing canteen.
The event for Ration Eater was brilliantly accompanied by the curator of the show, Callum, who prepared a cocktail revolving around the Vietnamese herb, Rice Paddy Herb/Ngo Om. An herb that came over to the Americas through the arrival of refugees from Vietnam. Callum had concentrated the rice paddy herb into a simple syrup paired with coconut water, Cointreau, Tanqueray, among other ingredients.
It was my first “relational work”, an activity that brought an intimate depth to the Ration Market project.
The event seemed like a fitting way to mark what feels like the closing of a chapter, with the openings of my three-years-in-making project, After the Cataclysm, Before the Storm, and my show of photographs and computer manufactured images in Destiny Is Not A Good Friend at Hunt Gallery. This period between March and April distills everything that I’ve been working on for three years—when I returned to Toronto in January 2020 after half a year working in Guangzhou, Jakarta, and Ho Chi Minh City, right before the pandemic.
It was a period of breakthrough development, I lived with the folks from HB Station / SJT / Boloho / Fong Fo and Gudskul / Serum / ruangrupa in the lead-up to their Documenta projects which in hindsight, imparted upon me a deep sensitivity to the spatial, political, material characteristics of the places around me. It untethered me from thinking about art production within silos, and to pay attention to the vernacular of culture (in the Bourdieu-sense) around me. To make art that may look less like art and more like the things around its means of production. This I believe, is a path towards continued experimentation.
Turbo at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre (Kingston, CA)
‘Turbo’ at @modernfuelarc is now showing until December 9th, 2021.
Viewers enter and exit the show through two images of a car crash, marking the entrance into the fictional race car world of ‘Turbo’ and an allusion to entering an economic crash. Viewers are then met with the absurd sonic world of ‘Turbo’, which is filled with car sounds made with my mouth, machine-made sports car engine vrooms, and some major bops about economic precarity.
‘The Young Comrade’ screening at The Polygon Gallery in ‘A Lingering Shadow’ co-presented by Centre A (Vancouver).
July 28, 2021 — August 12, 2021
Image courtesy of The Polygon Gallery, 2021.
Image courtesy of Centre A.
Image courtesy of Centre A.
Image courtesy of Centre A.
Lifebuoy for Te Magazine at TANK Art Festival (TANK Shanghai)
Lifebuoy in still image from computer rendering.
Lifebuoy is a new sculpture made in continuity with Life Preserver + The Arrival for Te Magazine at the upcoming TANK Art Festival at TANK Shanhai. A total of 144 imitation beef and fish balls (鱼蛋 and 牛丸) are vacuum sealed into 16 packages similar to those found in food markets. They are then bound together using plastic strings that are vernacular to daily life in Asia Pacific. Inspiration for Life Preserver + The Arrival came after noticing how meatballs eaten in the food cultures of Asia Pacific have a tendency to float in the soups that they are served in. This style of meatball originated from the Southern Chinese who, just like their meatballs, were ‘buoyant’ in the liquids of the South China Sea as they sailed for new homes across the region. Lifebuoy accompanies the inaugural launch of Te Magazine, an art and anthropology publication. I contributed two recipes and a reflection on food that has been developed and adapted by the Chinese diaspora in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Lifebuoy, 21x21x1”, 2021.
Lifebuoy, Work-In-Progress documentation.
Lifebuoy with wall vinyl of Lake Ontario (Toronto, Canada) in still image from computer rendering.
Lifebuoy situated in TANK Shanghai, still image from computer rendering.
Documentation of “The Young Comrade” Exhibition at The New Gallery, Calgary, Canada. June 2021.
The Young Comrade in Calgary/Mohkinstsis
An exterior image from “The Young Comrade” at The New Gallery. This public-facing curtain depicts a propaganda display that I saw at the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution in Beijing. The propaganda display originally depicted public celebration after the Chinese revolution of 1949 in the formally-colonized coastal city of Tianjin. The 1949 revolution is a historical moment that The Young Comrade combines with a magic realist play by Bertolt Brecht.
The architecture in this display must have been dated to the early 1900s when Western-style architecture was either built by force within colonized Chinese territory by Western nations. I choose to display this curtain to the public in Calgary because it looks similar to the building that The New Gallery is a tenant of in the Chinatown neighbourhood of Calgary.
I was thinking about how this style of architecture could be found in the costal cities of China and also in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary. Both had forceful contacts with the West all the while Chinese coolies worked and died in both the trading ports in the colonized cities and also across Canada while building the Canada Pacific Railway. In Cantonese, letting the young men in a family go work as coolies for Westerners was euphemistically termed, 賣豬仔, or “to sell the piglets”.
