A chair sits alone in the room.
A single object made for the human body, a reminder of presence as much as absence. Of who sat here. Of who may never return.

Blindfolded, I stitch. My hands move across the chair slowly, mending what cannot be fully mended. Red thread accumulates, spills from the seat, pools onto the floor. The act of making is repetitive, embodied, unhurried. In its rhythm, only the present moment exists.

The blindfold carries its own history. In the first iteration of this work, it was a black mask, the same kind worn by protesters in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020. To work without sight is to work from memory, from feeling, from something that lives in the body rather than the eyes.

. . . 

This performance began as a solo work and grew into a collaboration with Hong Kong writer and independent curator Yang Yeung, whose writing, reading and presence became inseparable from the work itself. In its later iterations, Yang Yeung’s voice accompanies the performance as an audio recording, her words stitching through the silence the way thread moves through fabric. Even when she is not physically present, she is deeply embedded in the work.

Together the performance holds pain and solitude, nostalgia and longing, the impossible question of homecoming. Stitching connects — threads, gestures, voices, silences. But mending, the work insists, can never be fully done.

. . .

Wound was first created for Longing For Home, solo exhibition, 2022, performed as an opening performance. [ Exhibition Catalogue ]

Subsequently commissioned by CHAT 六廠, Hong Kong, 2023, developed as a duo performance and artist talk with Yang Yeung as part of their public program.

Bearing Wound, Honouring Suture, Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, Sydney, 2024, performed at the opening of Encounter, with Yang Yeung’s audio recording.