Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions. The drawings incorporate both traditional and contemporary Chinese landscape techniques to reflect on the memory, history, and aesthetic practices of the Chinese laborers who played a prominent role in the American westward expansion. By representing the Western landscape according to Chinese aesthetics, Lam calls attention to the distortions and cultural specificity of American representations of the Western landscape and non-Western cultures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Truong Cong Tung’s Journey of a Piece of Soil (2013) and its accompanying object-based installation of the same name (2014) consider the function of ritual in larger modes of collective engagement and cultural production. In examining how spirituality inflects social engagement, Truong’s contemplates the juncture at which the rational beings encounter the unexplained while also suggesting how embodied practices offer vital conduits for experiencing new modes of consciousness. The video features a man dressed in camouflage fatigues with a blue cap tilling a patch of red-clay soil amidst a green-stalk covered patch of land.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chinese restaurants have been a familiar feature of Swedish cities since the late 1970s, embodying the foreign and the exotic. Lap-See-Lam started the project by documenting the interiors of several Chinese restaurants in Stockholm at a time when many of them were about to be taken off the map. Her own family was selling their business in 2015.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jes Fan’s video work Xenophoria , as opposed to the term ‘xenophobia’, refers to a love of the foreign and is inspired by the name of a mysterious species of aquatic carrier shell. This creature, Xenophora pallidae, calcifies free-floating objects in the water to its spine, bringing foreign bodies into its own structure. Likewise, Xenophoria stages a delirious search for the melanin pigment – the molecule responsible for skin color – as it manifests in both human and non-human bodies.