老家 (Laojia) // Old Home
Artist book and installation
Curated by Jordan Gonzales, Allison C. Hernandez, & Ming Yin
On view May 15 - 22
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Visit: by appointment, 9am-6pm. Click here for reservations.
Closing reception: May 22, 5 - 8pm
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老家 (Laojia) is the Chinese concept of a person’s geocultural homeland or origin. Although rooted in real geographies, 老家 exists mainly in the psychological geographies of those who live apart from their homeland.
The idea of 老家 contains within it a duality. First, there is the place that exists in real time and space - this is the homeland as it exists in the past, present, and future. Then, there is the place that exists in the psyche, outside of empirical time and space. Our project lives in the sensuous synthesis of these two places and asks how does it look, smell, taste, sound, feel like to be in and to recall that space.
老家 explores five artists’ processes of recalling, imagining, and representing their own homelands, and the negotiation that occurs between the artists’ positionalities and subjectivities within their own diasporas. Iris Yirei Hu, Stephanie Shih, Sichong Xie, and Tshab Her each have a geocultural origin that falls within or intersects with present Chinese national borders; yet each artist lives primarily, if not exclusively, apart from these geographies. They all create space for the synthesis between their homelands and ever-evolving diasporas to meet and merge and grow into new spaces.
Iris Yirei Hu crafts vibrantly colorful and haptic assemblages representing “a culmination of networks that reverberate through time and space in both tangible and cosmic ways.” Through her creative practice, Iris cultivates and embodies the intimacy between people and place.
Tshab Her approaches much of her work through her identity as a second-generation Hmong-American woman, searching for an authentic self. Her work confronts issues of home, erasure, and displacement by reclaiming space through storytelling and craft, incorporating colors and words into an everyday practice of radical resistance.
Dealing with issues of identity, politics, and cross-culturalism, Sichong Xie confronts ideas of home through body-based sculptural forms. Xie’s works explore the fluidity of memory, her female identity as reflected in Chinese politics, and the surreal characteristics of her body in an ever-changing environment.
Through the creation of her ceramic grocery items, Stephanie Shih explores the “shared experience of being from a nonexistent homeland: Asian America.” From ideation to research to production, Shih’s process excavates the layers of dynamism and sharedness inherent in belonging to a diaspora.
This project culminates in an artist book, with the hope that by encountering the artists’ works, words, and ephemera in a format reminiscent of family scrapbooks and photo albums, we can honor the vulnerability and intimacy that come with recalling and sharing our homes and homelands.
Programmed by the USC Roski School of Art and Design