Possibly, There

2026

Engraved aluminum in artist’s frame with dried poppy pod and Hong Kong dollars coins

64 x 48 inches

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The exhibition title Possibly, Here encapsulates uncertainty preserved in an archive. Its genesis lies in a photograph dated 1900 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection. It is catalogued as a question: View from Hillside Toward City and Harbor, marked “Possibly Hong Kong.”, never fully anchored to a fixed place.

 

Looking for the past of my homeland inside a foreign archive, I encountered something more intimate than proof: a resonance. I grew up on a hillside. At twilight, the harbor would appear like a quiet stage, always framed by branches and leaves, as if the landscape could only be seen through a living border. When I first saw the photograph, resonance arrived before certainty. Familiar, yet distant. Far, yet near.

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The opening work, Possibly, There follows this search, as well as its failure. A location misfiled or withheld becomes an opening for feeling. The imprecision of geography makes space for an attachment that cannot be verified by labels. “Possibly” names a condition as much as a place: a global port at the margins, bilingual and multilingual by necessity, postcolonial by inheritance.

 

“Possibly” is also how I approach found images and within an expanded archive. When I engrave on metal, I work with both presence and absence, on a material once widely used for mass image reproduction and circulation. I translate the camera’s certainty into the touch of the hand, allowing hesitation, pressure, and tension to enter the picture. I want to turn an image into an afterimage: an airy photograph like a breath-mark, a scar made luminous, a relic that remains fleeting. I think of the process as sculpting with light and painting with shadow shifting with movement, viewing angle, and illumination. The image in flux refuses a single, stable reading. Memory, too, returns as a fragmented optics, flickering in the heart.