Home in Moving Parts (carried with us)

Home in Moving Parts (carried with us)
paper sculpture  (paper mache, found and recycled cardboard, cast paper, papers gathered in Chinatown), furniture dollies, ratchet straps, wood, lamp components, full spectrum bulb
66” x 50” x 78” and 36” x 25” x 36”
2023

commissioned by Chinese Culture Center for the Present Tense Biennial: Perilous Playground

Portsmouth Square is one of the only open public spaces in San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of the most densely packed neighborhoods in the western US. Because of this, the site is sometimes coloquially referred to as Chinatown’s “living room.” With the pending demolition of the pedestrian bridge as part of upcoming renovations to the plaza, can we imagine this not as an end, but a diffusion, where benches that served as a place of rest live on in other iterations? In conversations, artist-curator Heesoo Kwon informed me that due to the bridge’s global fame as a skateboarding spot, segments of the sloped brick walls and concrete benches have already been replicated in competition courses, practice ramps, and trendy commercial street furniture. What if we were to extend and refigure that logic to other ends? I envision these mobile sculptures as malleable receptacles for neighborhood memories of gathering, even as the original site is changed.

The exhibition launches in conjunction with the Hungry Ghost Festival, during which it is common to burn paper replicas of money, food, and luxury goods in order to carry them to ancestors in the spirit world. While I take a different approach to paper sculpture making, there is a shared sense of how these imperfect paper approximations can carry the histories, stories, questions, or spiritual qualities that they inherit from the original referent. They serve as a kind of stand in—the ghostly object that can be transformed by fire or live on as a reminder of the spaces that came before.

Exhibition history:
Perilous Playground, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (2023)