lei san tung
2011 - 2014
Lei San Tung is the name of the town where my grandfather was born, in Guangzhou, China. At the beginning of the 20th century, he emigrated to America, settling permanently some years later in Zacatecas, Mexico. I bring together under this name works related to migration and faraway places, in an attempt to honour this undeniable human right and universal act. These works also embody an exercise on memory, understood as the internal reconstruction of spaces that no longer exist or that are geographically inaccessible to us.
transnavigations
2015: Lisbon mindscapes
As part of the Transnavigations, a collective project, I fictionalized Lisbon from Mexico City, walking through streets and hotels with that name, finding fragments of Lisbon in music, films or novels. This material gathers drawings, an intervened tourist guide and collages inspired in Google Maps glitches.
londres buenavista hotel
2016
The Hotel Londres stood in Mexico City’s popular Buenavista neighborhood for half a century before being demolished to make way for gentrified housing. Using pieces of tile found in situ, I tried to reconstruct the original designs that covered its walls.
The resulting drawings address the concept of ruin and debris, to point out the missing pieces in the history of that hotel: the lives of the people who inhabited that hotel, possibly with abuse and violence.
I carefully and lovingly reconstruct each of the broken pieces, as an act of recording and acknowledging the countless lives that existed and resisted.
paintings of china
2013 - 2014
These paintings emerged from a trip I made with family members in an effort to locate our grandfather's village in China and the rest of the family who stayed there.
Upon arriving in Lei San Tung, we discovered his house, still standing with photos of him, more than half a century after that house was last inhabited.
These paintings explore how places that belong to us, even those we don't know, root us, holding the power to shape our interior.
chinese golden dragon
2012
Chinese Golden Dragon is an altar for my grandfather. This suitcase is loaded with family photographs, contains a braid made of my hair and a poem from the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York.
The golden dragon is a symbol of power and honor, a metaphor for migrants, whose paths maintain complicated relationships with power, strength and luck.
This suitcase-shaped box was made for the traveling exhibition project Migrant Suitcases, and was exhibited in Mexico, the United States, Belgium and San Salvador.
The golden dragon is a symbol of power and honor, a metaphor for migrants, whose paths maintain complicated relationships with power, strength and luck.
This suitcase-shaped box was made for the traveling exhibition project Migrant Suitcases, and was exhibited in Mexico, the United States, Belgium and San Salvador.