Place Listening is an installation that explores how sound may act as a trigger for memories, be they real or imagined. Rooted in a series of auto-fictional exercises interpolated from archival photographs drawn from the artist’s personal history, this work traces her nomadic experiences of moving across Southeast Asia from early childhood to adulthood. Inviting audience members to sit in on her stories, four chairs within the installation each holds the cue to a soundscape composed to evoke the artist’s memories of going to school in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, from the 1970s through the early 2000s, while a fifth chair leads to a circular slide projector playing on loop to reveal a decade-long observational diary of public chairs in Hong Kong, probing at the relationship between technologies of information storage and the construction of public memories.

How does the body respond to migration? What gestural traces does it leave across lands and languages? How do we narrate the embodied histories of movement that shape who we are, what we feel?

Over the past decade, I've been reimagining the body beyond mere solitary form, like an extension of the spaces we inhabit, the communities we move through, the ideologies we carry. Through photographs of chairs placed in outdoor spaces across Hong Kong—images collected between 2014 and 2024—I trace a different kind of choreography. These empty chairs become gestures, held in suspension. They wait, they remember, they mark the places where bodies once rested or might return. In their stillness, new narratives emerge."

← Work 9

Place Listening is an installation that explores how sound may act as a trigger for memories, be they real or imagined. Rooted in a series of auto-fictional exercises interpolated from archival photographs drawn from the artist’s personal history, this work traces her nomadic experiences of moving across Southeast Asia from early childhood to adulthood. Inviting audience members to sit in on her stories, four chairs within the installation each holds the cue to a soundscape composed to evoke the artist’s memories of going to school in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, from the 1970s through the early 2000s, while a fifth chair leads to a circular slide projector playing on loop to reveal a decade-long observational diary of public chairs in Hong Kong, probing at the relationship between technologies of information storage and the construction of public memories.

How does the body respond to migration? What gestural traces does it leave across lands and languages? How do we narrate the embodied histories of movement that shape who we are, what we feel?

Over the past decade, I've been reimagining the body beyond mere solitary form, like an extension of the spaces we inhabit, the communities we move through, the ideologies we carry. Through photographs of chairs placed in outdoor spaces across Hong Kong—images collected between 2014 and 2024—I trace a different kind of choreography. These empty chairs become gestures, held in suspension. They wait, they remember, they mark the places where bodies once rested or might return. In their stillness, new narratives emerge."

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