Almost a Love Story
2025.02.15 – 2025.03.23
Opening：15th February, 2025 (Saturday) 16:30
Artist Sharing：15th February, 2025 (Saturday) 14:30
Artist：YANG Hoimei
Venue：Lumenvisum｜Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, L2-02, 30 Pak Tin St, Shek Kip Mei
Opening Hours：Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00-13:00, 14:00-18:00, Closed on Mondays (except Public Holiday)
Opening & Artist Sharing Session：
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/940275087097?aff=oddtdtcreator
Plan your visit：
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1235292847159?aff=oddtdtcreator
Exhibition Overview
This exhibition is about my mother Susan, a third-generation Chinese Indonesian born in Pontianak in 1962. It was quite precarious to be a Chinese in Indonesia when she was growing up. The government pursued a policy of assimilation and closed down Chinese schools. Her family was also forced to relocate from the countryside to Jakarta. In 1990, Susan married a local Hong Kong (HK) fisherman whom she met through a matchmaker. Together, they had two daughters before her passing in 2015. A decade has passed before the opening of this exhibition.
During the 1980s and the 1990s, many Indonesian Chinese women saw HK as a dreamland. They believed that a transnational marriage with a HK man would allow them to move up the social ladder and escape from familial and societal issues back home. However, these relationships often involved underprivileged men in HK and might not turn out to be what they had imagined.
A few years back, I started to learn the skills for making Canton porcelain. As a kind of chinaware made primarily for export to Europe and the United States, Canton porcelain symbolised the Chinese desire for a better life and reflected the Western fantasies of an Oriental paradise. In my work, I appropriate the forms and techniques of Canton porcelain by reinterpreting the traditional symbols of its iconography and juxtaposing them with my collection of family photographs. In this way, I draw a parallel between these Western fantasies of the Orient and the Southeast Asian Chinese women’s imaginations of HK and China.
Family photographs typically depict a facade of happiness. While these snapshots capture the “that-has-been”, they do not always represent the full reality. The discrepancy between imagination and reality often leads to disappointment and hurt, which can be passed down through the generations. Dealing with these traumas requires us to break away from our obsession with beautiful symbols and to confront reality with courage. I do not speak Bahasa Indonesia and I seldom visit Indonesia; my impression of Susan can only be partial. By reliving her experiences through my artmaking, I gain a valuable opportunity to think about my own life. It is not a journey to “find roots” or excuses; I hope to understand how my thoughts and values have been shaped by family and migratory histories.
Curatorial Statement
Yang Hoi Mei’s mother passed away suddenly in 2015. To heal herself from the loss, Yang turned to her artmaking, which led to her first solo exhibition in 2018. The exhibition helped Yang address her conflicted emotions towards her mother and let go of her sense of guilt. After the exhibition, Yang thought she had moved on from the tragic event. However, as she looked through her collection of family photographs and continued to learn more about her mother’s life, Yang realised she would never understand her completely. Born in Pontianak in 1962, Yang’s mother followed the well-trodden path of Chinese women from her village who left for Taiwan or Hong Kong (HK) in search of a husband who would uplift their economic status. She arrived in HK in 1990 and, through the help of her cousin who was a matchmaker, married a local man from a fishing family. Forced to leave their boat and move ashore when he was a kid, his family was severed from their generational connection to the sea; it was a micro history that unfolded within the celebrated transformation of HK from a fishing enclave to a thriving metropolis. Unfortunately, their marriage did not last.
A few years back, Yang started to learn the craft and history of Canton porcelain. In the Canton porcelain, Yang sees the perfect embodiment of the intersecting desires between the Middle Kingdom and the West since the Qing dynasty. In this exhibition, Yang appropriates the forms and symbols of Canton porcelain and combines them with images taken from her family photographs to create new pieces of chinaware. It is an attempt to narrate another possibility to her mother’s life. The speed and candid appearance of family snapshots interface the slowness and demand for control in making Canton porcelain, giving Yang the time and space to consider her mother’s experiences from a broader perspective. She began to see the connections between her mother’s life and the experiences of other Indonesian Chinese women who migrated to HK for various reasons. In this exhibition, Yang expands the scope of her artmaking by unpacking the effects of family life, personal desires, identity politics, and the patriarchy in society, which shaped the decisions and experiences of her mother and her Indonesian Chinese friends in HK.
In the exhibition space, there is a round table that recalls the wedding banquet. Most of the porcelain pieces on the table visualise the idealistic imaginations of marriage life, which compelled Yang’s mother to leave Indonesia for HK. Her fascination for HK was fuelled by popular movies that the colonial city once exported to Southeast Asia. However, her dreams were shattered when she realised that her choice of men in HK was extremely limited; Yang visualises the three potential partners whom the matchmaker introduced to her mother in three of the porcelain plates. In the other half of the exhibition space, Yang sets up a few pedestals with porcelain pieces inlaid into their surfaces. The porcelain pieces feature portraits of women from different generations within Yang’s extended family. Yang connects the pedestals with cotton strings, which visualise the blood ties of these women, but the installation also hints at the friction that existed within the family and points to the passing down of trauma through the generations. There is also a fishing net in one corner of the space, with butterflies trapped in it, or scattered below. Somehow, these seemingly lifeless butterflies remind us of the moths that hurl themselves hopefully into the burning light.
Artist Biography
YANG Hoimei
Yang Hoi Mei graduated in 2015 from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. Three years after graduation, Yang held her first solo exhibition, Buat Suance (Dear Susan), funded by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. In 2020, Yang participated in the Jockey Club Intangible Cultural Heritage Education Program, where she learnt the craft and art of Canton porcelain and delved into its history and tradition. Her works were shortlisted for the “Competition of Tea Ware by Hong Kong Potters”, held by the Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware in 2021.
As a Hong Kong artist whose Chinese mother had migrated from Indonesia, Yang focuses on issues concerning the Chinese diaspora and the dynamics of family life. By reflecting on the essence of Canton porcelain and reinterpreting its symbols, Yang unpacks the effects of different cultures interfacing with one another and seeks to find their contemporary significance.
Curator Biography
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.
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Supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council