Folio, 2024. Archival pigment print mounted on dibond with laminate, 30" x 90".
"Unfamiliar Portraits," 2025
"Unfamiliar Portraits" examines the complex relationship between queer identity and familial legacy through conceptual photography, wax sculptures, and textiles. Engaging with materials that speak to both domesticity and ritualistic transformation, the works explore the ambiguity of familial structures and ancestral reverence. The exhibition functions as a site of transformation, an alt-historical archive which seeks to amplify voices that have been silenced or omitted from generational storytelling.
Through various media, including the artist's own physical presence, the work creates space for untold narratives that didn't conform to heteronormative expectations. Uncertainty and speculation give way to fiction and assertion, as everyday materials become markers of presence and absence. This multimedia installation continues an ongoing investigation of intergenerational memory and identity through a queer Asian-Canadian lens, inviting viewers to contemplate their own relationship with inherited histories and cultural identity.
From Exhibition Guide
The exhibition, Unfamiliar Portraits, transforms the gallery into a space where public and private realms converge. As guests move through, they encounter works that act as thresholds, marking transitions from exterior to interior spaces. This journey becomes a metaphor for exploring family legacy and cultural inheritance — each threshold unveiling increasingly intimate narratives that hover between memory and speculation, documentation and possibility.
Moments of both celebration and remembrance mark the wall nearest the entrance. Anamnetics, with its bouquet-like forms, evokes objects of commemoration and tribute. Like cultivated gardens and collected plants, these pieces reveal how domestic rituals anchor memories and give meaning to spaces. Infill documents a poignant transformation: a family pond that housed goldfish for two generations, now converted into a simple garden plot after persistent battles with raccoons, herons, and neighborhood cats. This shift in function marks a change in family rituals. The transformation suggests both loss and preservation, while presenting this evolution as renewal — a theme that echoes throughout the exhibition.
Further into the gallery, Bowing presents an image of bamboo in a traditional Chinese vase, their stalks bent and twisted under the weight of fishing leads. The life-size scale of the photograph emphasizes the figurative quality of the plant — like bodies burdened. This work considers the physical manifestation of inheritance — of cultural memories and familial obligations. The bamboo's natural resilience stands in tension with its forced posture, inviting contemplation of how ancestral histories weigh upon the present.
Throughout the exhibit, recurring materials create a visual rhythm: cotton twine, charred peach pits, dried ash leaves. These organic elements become domesticated, personalized, and imbued with meaning through deliberate manipulation and transformation. Like tenderly preserved memories, pressed leaves gain significance through the labor of their preservation. Peaches — symbols of both immortality and queer love — appear as carbonized remnants, like fossilized hearts. Through fire, they become markers of stories erased from family histories, particularly those that diverged from heteronormative expectations. These altered materials endure as evidence of what was lost, precariously preserved for the future.
At the heart of the exhibition, a series of portraits including Son, Daughter, and Forebear, engages in speculation and queer world-building. Through various roles and relationships, the work creates an alternative family album that questions conventional narratives. These three portraits are deliberately positioned opposite to Descendant, a seated male figure, stern and stoic, with Residuals' bowl of burnt pits to the figure's left. These images occupy the intersections of truth and fantasy — an alt-historical recounting that suggests a reevaluation of familial bonds. Their layout and positioning challenge the uncomfortable dynamics of family, expressing a desire to confront and rebuild a new kind of "normal" — a queering of family.
The exhibition culminates with Bitters II, which serves as a final site for contemplation. The work invites direct viewer interaction; visitors can pick up and examine small wax packets containing torn photographs, their semi-opaque surfaces both concealing and enshrining their contents. When held close, these packets release subtle notes of incense, reminiscent of fire rituals and ceremonial practices across many Asian cultures and religions.
Unfamiliar Portraits deliberately dissolves the boundaries between private and public spaces of remembrance. This gesture mirrors the complex navigation of queer identity within family histories — the trope of challenge to conventions; however, the disruption also stands as a reverent collaboration with ancestral memory. The gallery transforms into a space where multiple truths coexist — where the hidden becomes visible, the private becomes public, and the forgotten finds new forms of remembrance. This metamorphosis invites viewers to examine their own relationships with inherited histories and to contemplate how personal narratives endure, evolve, or fade across generations.
Unfamiliar Portraits is the both the title of the exhibition and the body of photographic works. The exhinition, Unfamiliar Portraits, was held at Red Head Gallery, Toronto ON from February 28th to March 22nd, 2025.
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