2023.03.31 – 2023.04.30
Lumenvisum｜L2-02, Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, 30 Pak Tin Street, Shek Kip Mei, Kowloon
Opening Reception: 2023.04.01, Sat, 4:00pm
Artist Sharing: 2023.04.01, Sat, 2:30pm
Online Registration
Opening Reception and Sharing Session: https://www.eventbrite.hk/e/598276690687
Plan your visit: https://www.eventbrite.hk/e/598243982857
“Photography in Southeast Asia” series is back again after a difficult time in the past few years. Collaborating with ZHUANG Wubin, this year we invited Donna Chiu to participate in the 4th “Photography in Southeast Asia”. Born in Hong Kong, Chiu moved to Singapore in 1996. As an immigrant and a daughter with distant relationship with her parents, it has been a long and arduous process to build a sense of “home”. In this exhibition, she tries to understand and express her own experiences and emotions through her art-making, and to explore the possibilities in destiny of life.
Chiu said she came from a diasporic family, not only because she and her family do not always stay together, it also reflects her personal experience of moving to Singapore in her early years. Chiu’s practice focuses mainly on painting and photography, “I like to experiment with texture, which gives me the feeling of layering my different experiences and emotions. The photographic images in this exhibition mark specific incidents in our diasporic journeys.”
The “Photography in Southeast Asia” of Lumenvisum has been postponed due to the travelling restrictions in the past few years. As curator ZHUANG Wubin said, for the ordinary people like us, we may feel helpless sometimes when we realize there is nothing much that we can do, and we share the same feeling no matter who we are and where we live. “For Chiu’s family members, the decision to leave has always been a choice and a privilege. But that does not negate the bouts of helplessness and anxiety that marked their diasporic journeys. This is the condition of life that they share with the HK people and the overseas Chinese across Southeast Asia.”
This April, Lumenvisum presents “Photography in Southeast Asia IV: Donna Chiu – Sitting by the Window, Looking at the Painting Dry”, we sincerely invite you to visit the exhibition and meet the art from Southeast Asia. If you are interested in talking with Donna Chiu, you are also welcome to attend the opening and sharing session on April 1.
About the artist
Donna Chiu
Donna Chiu is a HK-born Singapore-based visual artist. Her practice focuses mainly on photography and painting.
Using art as a mean to make sense of the world, Donna’s work unfolds in an introspective dialogue with herself and often takes the form of abstraction. In recent years, her artmaking process has also served as therapy to the emotional trauma that she experienced, which she finds difficult to express in words.
Donna’s work has been exhibited in Asia and Europe, including the Singapore International Photography Festival (2016), Obscura Festival of Photography (Malaysia, 2018) and A(R)TITUDE Festival (Italy, 2022).
About the curator
ZHUANG Wubin
Zhuang Wubin is a writer who makes photographs, publications and exhibitions. He is interested in photography’s entanglements with modernity, colonialism, nationalism, “Chineseness” and the Cold War in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.
Zhuang is a recipient of the Prince Claus Fund research grant (2010) and a Lee Kong Chian research fellow at the National Library Board (NLB) of Singapore (Dec 2017 to Jun 2018). He is the major grantee of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant 2018. He has been invited to research residency programmes at Institute Technology of Bandung (2013), Asia Art Archive (AAA), Hong Kong (2015), Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (2017) and the Ha Bik Chuen Archive Project at AAA (2018). He is the contributing curator of the Chiang Mai Photo Festival (2015, 2017, 2020).
Published by NUS Press, Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey (2016) is his fourth book.
About Lumenvisum
Lumenvisum is a non-profit art organization dedicated to the promotion of photography. Founded by four veteran photographers in 2007, it is a platform for cultural exchange, educational outreach, sharing of resources and building of knowledge.