Chickadee Dressed as Chinese Opera

This exhibition brings together a series of sculptural paintings, installations, interactive kinetic sculptures that activate in response to the presence of viewers. Through embedded infrared sensors and concealed mechanical systems, domestic objects (including ceramics, furniture, textiles, and familial heirlooms) tremble, rotate, or subtly shift as audiences move through the space. The works transform seemingly static artifacts into responsive bodies, implicating the viewer within an unfolding choreography of proximity, perception, and instability.

Drawing from the artist’s experience as a Canadian-born, second-generation Chinese Canadian, the exhibition considers the ways diasporic identity is negotiated through inherited objects, domestic rituals, and material memory. Family possessions become repositories of migration, carrying the aspirations, cultural translations, and unresolved tensions that accompany the movement of people that can span generations. Rather than functioning as documentary evidence, these objects operate as unstable cultural signifiers whose meanings continually shift between the personal history and the broader narratives of displacement and belonging.

Presented in Halifax, the city where the artist’s father first immigrated to Canada and established a Chinese restaurant, the exhibition situates personal lineage within the longer histories of migration that have shaped the region. The site becomes more than backdrop; it functions as an active context through which questions of settlement, inheritance, and cultural identity are reconsidered.

By requiring the physical presence of viewers to animate the work, the exhibition foregrounds the reciprocal relationship between observer and object. Acts of looking become acts of disruption, as sculptures register proximity through subtle mechanical gestures that evoke vulnerability, precarity, and the persistent negotiation of visibility. Collectively, the installations examine how migration continues to reverberate through everyday material culture, where domestic objects become sites through which memory, identity, and belonging are continually performed, contested, and reimagined.

This exhibition is dedicated to the artists’ Father and Mother: Sit Ng Yu and Yuet Kwai Yu. With special thanks to James Rollo.