Michele Chu: you, trickling

EVENT DESCRIPTION

How does one confront loss—personal and collective? In her past works, Michele Chu has engaged in relational art within the context of acute social disruption, building installations and participatory performances that rewrite public gestures. For her debut solo exhibition, “you, trickling,” the artist further mines rituals of intimacy and vulnerability, inviting viewers to participate in a meditative journey that renders the autobiographical as shared experience, and memory as material.

Throughout the exhibition space, the loss of a body—or bodies—reveals a spectral map that oscillates between the ghostly interpersonal relationships of the artist and her ailing mother, foregrounded by water leaking, reforming, condensing, and fracturing. At the entrance, the visitor is met with a wall of fabric separating two spaces: the exterior world, ruled by social order and automaticity, and the fragmented interior, where trauma, memory, and the self resides. Walking further into the exhibition, one encounters a series of rituals faintly reminiscent of a bathhouse experience that cleanses, soothes, and unsettles. From there, a collection of body parts emerges: a belly button, cast in bronze; a softened hand reaching out; sharp perforations on skin; a woman’s back toward us, lying still and silent. Demarcated by tunnels and fabric passageways, the space encloses the visitor in its umbilical recollections of birth, menstruation, excretion, and death.

In The Body Keeps Its Score, a book about suffering and survival, Bessel van der Kolk suggests that to perform is to conduct agency; that “acting is an experience of using your body to take your place in life.” Addressing an unknown second person, “you, trickling” is both a poignant observation—of the lost and fading maternal figure—and a guide to how we might flow back, however slowly, into ourselves.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Michele Chu (b. 1994, based in Hong Kong) is a multidisciplinary artist engaged in practices of intimacy and ritual. In her experimentations with different materials and elements, she investigates how the body manifests and adapts in situations of public tension or private introspection. As one of the many emerging artists practicing in post-handover Hong Kong, Chu examines ephemerality and ludic play in relation to intense social change and communal relationships. An important element in her practice is the concept of the barrier and how it informs normative social interactions. Through walls of mesh, fabric, and glass, she initiates rituals of intimacy and care, acknowledging that a physical barrier can often aid in the deconstruction of invisible, intangible ones.

Her work has been shown at 1A Space (Hong Kong); Negative Space (Hong Kong); and Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong). She is a recipient of the HART Haus Studio grant.