I'M ALRIGHT, I'M NOT ALRIGHT... • 2016—2021
I'M ALRIGHT, I'M NOT ALRIGHT... • 2016—2021
To arrive is to be cut open.
To stay is to learn how to mend.
. . .
Rolls of rice paper hang from ceiling to floor, filling the room. Each sheet has been cut, taped closed and hand stitched, an act of harm followed by an act of healing, repeated across every surface. The rice paper is delicate, fragile and semitransparent, like skin. Each piece is individual. None of them looks the same.
Visitors walk through and between the rolls, close enough to see the scars, close enough to touch them. A video is projected onto the hanging paper, a close up of hands stitching, intimate and meditative. The face is absent. The absence is deliberate. The viewer can place themselves there.
This work was made in the years when I was still learning what it meant to arrive somewhere new, the depression, the displacement, the slow and uncertain finding of a way. The cutting and the stitching are both true. Neither cancels the other out.
The mending is never fully done. But we return to it anyway.
. . .
I’m Alright, I’m Not Alright was developed as part of my Honours degree, 2014—2015, and first exhibited in Shades of Red, at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, Hong Kong, 2017.
Presented as an Interactive Performance—'Every Pandiculate', Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2018.
First shown in Sydney as part of Shades of Red IV, The Incinerator Gallery, 2021, with an opening performance by artist Natalie Quanyau Tso.
. . .