Keywords： Identity, Memory, Cultural Disjuncture，Metaphor，Melancholy.
Mon May 12 2025
The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
I want to begin this reflection with Karl Marx’s remark. I do not wish to interpret this passage out of context or dogmatically; strictly speaking, perhaps it does not belong here, because Marx did not claim that there is a human essence. The term ‘human essence’ is derived from Feuerbach’s anthropology and is not a concept of critical science. He only said here that what Feuerbach called the so-called ‘human essence’ is nothing more than an abstraction of certain social relations, but this abstraction itself arises only on the basis of a real material foundation. My analytical approach… does not start from man but from a specific socio-economic period. — Karl Marx, Critique of Adolph Wagner’s “Textbook of Political Economy”
I selected this quotation to emphasize one point: social relations. Humans are highly adaptable beings; when someone attempts to integrate into a new environment, they are reshaped by that environment. Integrating into a new context is like a bird joining a flock.
In Unit 2, I focused on the painful aspects of my experience—separation, difficulty integrating into a new culture, broken and rebuilt interpersonal relationships, uncontrollable surroundings, and the instability of inner subjectivity. The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. How do people in the same situation as me view the changes in their lives, and how do they cope with the anxiety of an identity that goes nowhere? Although my works are more about my own experiences and feelings, responding to unfamiliar fields under the same topic is also necessary to broaden my horizons.
With these themes in mind, I chose the Migration Museum located in Lewisham as the focus of my research. I was initially excited because Lewisham is not far from where I live in Peckham. However, just as I was preparing to visit, I discovered that the Migration Museum’s temporary location in Lewisham closed on March 30, 2025. This was unfortunate, but fortunately, the museum's website offers a wealth of information that allowed me to continue my research remotely.
I found a blog post from 2019 about Room to Breathe, a project by the New Art Studio.During their residency, the New Art Studio transformed part of the Migration Museum into a gallery space, showcasing past and current artworks created by a diverse group of people from different backgrounds and artistic interests. The blog discusses key aspects of art therapy practice through a series of questions and answers. I have excerpted some of the most relevant insights: Art therapy among disadvantaged groups such as asylum seekers and refugees is recognised as a powerful tool to help overcome the trauma that exile and displacement cause. The need to make a mark becomes urgent when one’s life has been under threat—it is a way to affirm one’s existence.I hadn't thought of using the word resilience until now. In the context of migration, resilience is not merely the ability to endure displacement and instability; it is an act of creative resistance against erasure and loss.
My mother and I moved from a relatively poor county to Shanghai, China’s wealthiest city. Shanghai is actually very similar to London: an inclusive and diverse metropolis. Yet when people leave their hometown, they only realize where they came from because they no longer fit seamlessly like a piece of a puzzle. The culture of my birthplace shaped my habits, tastes, language, friends, family, and memories—these almost constituted me. In this new home, I needed to reestablish all of these. “Cultural disjuncture” inevitably descended upon me: it became difficult to adapt my behaviors, language habits, and values, bringing persistent identity anxiety.
This is a kind of subtle discomfort, sometimes be sharp, sometimes be hidden. But many dull pains go unspoken for fear of complaint—this city is full of outsiders like me; so much pain is endured in silence. Why can’t you bear it, too? In collective discourse, silenced suffering is marginalized and dissolved. The pain of exile is undeniably distressing, but because it is bearable, it is “actively forgotten.” Active forgetting is not an unconscious loss of memory but the intentional suppression, masking, or erasure of certain traumatic or embarrassing histories at the personal or collective level to maintain the existing discursive order. In Memory, Ian Farr notes that artists can reveal the politics of this forgetting strategy itself through “absence,” “blank space,” or destructive means: Which memories are deliberately ignored? Who has the power to choose memory and forgetting?
When I look back at my hometown, there is almost no material evidence of my past life left. I grew up in the early 21st century, when China’s infrastructure evolved rapidly. My old home, my former school, the malls and parks I frequented almost no longer exist or have been rebuilt beyond recognition. My connection to my hometown has, in a sense, been severed. Yet what constitutes my “past” does not vanish. I might borrow Derrida’s notion of “hauntology”: the past does not completely disappear but haunts the present in ghostly form—it is neither fully present nor entirely absent, but drifts in reality as traces, echoes, and images. Thus, in Unit 1 and earlier work, I often depicted memories directly as a form of commemoration, using artistic practice to summon these “ghosts” from silence into dialogue with viewers. In other words, memory is no longer a passive repository of the past but an experience of presence that can be continuously “ignited” and “re-enacted.”
Materializing memories through artistic practice reminds me of Diane Meyer’s response in A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age when asked, “Is your personal connection to digital images the same as it is to photographic prints?” She said, “I think the ability to hold a photograph in one’s hand in real time and space, and the very important sensory experience of touch adds new levels of meaning and significance to the image. The printed photograph begins to have its own history as an object in the world, which deepens its relationship to the past and provides a sense of permanence that digital images lack.” As for printmaking, the process itself carries materiality and further enhances tactile sensory experience. Pelzer-Montada argues in The Attraction of Print: Notes on the Surface of the (Art) Print that the rich textures and inherent tactile potential of prints distinguish them from painting, photography, and new media. Thus, one could argue that printmaking holds even greater space in the contemporary politics of memory.
Pelzer-Montada’s exploration of print’s tactile textures reminds me of Belkis Ayón, who, through networks of meticulously printed dots, weaves together figures and symbols. These dot matrices are not uniform arrays but, through variations in tone and density, evoke a fabric-like quality—allowing viewers to perceive the paper’s subtle undulations visually. Although Belkis Ayón’s works may seem emotionally restrained—presenting a silent palette of black, white, and gray, with her figures often expressionless and taciturn, imparting an overall air of “calm” or even “solemnity”—her titles frequently allude to betrayal, death, funerals, or unsettling mysteries. This stark tension between serene imagery and ominous titles intensifies the underlying emotional charge.
approx. 120 × 260 cm.
approx. 200 × 150 cm.
collagraph and etching on paper,
72 × 100 cm.
Compared to the mystical rituals of Belkis Ayón, my visual language is more influenced by Toba Khedoori—her works are likewise calm and restrained, yet more rational, mostly depict tangible, material objects, yet through her manipulation of scale and the use of negative space, they evoke a sense of solitude, stillness, rationality, and elusiveness. They are highly precise, but these familiar objects—once removed from their original context—begin to feel surreal. The expanses of blank space in her work made me realize that the canvas is not merely a surface for images; it can occupy a more focal position within the artwork itself. In other words, her paper becomes part of the artistic installation. Through expansive, vast yet unrigid compositions, she draws the viewer’s gaze inward and envelops their field of vision. She showed me a way of thinking: how to approach an image, how to engage with the canvas.
Oil on linen, 31 3/4 x 41 1/2 inches
Oil and wax on paper TK 006
From these, I discovered the power of repetition: repeatedly depicting the same object, such as a bird or a piece of cloth, in different scales or states can generate potent symbolism. I chose the bird and the boat as recurring motifs. In some respects, the bird symbolizes myself, and boats and rivers inherently convey feelings of drifting and displacement. The repeated imagery of birds and boats evolved into a kind of visual refrain. I found that by changing their scale or altering their states—sometimes appearing whole, sometimes fragmented or fading into the background—I could create a more complex emotional landscape. The birds became both real creatures and metaphors for restless searching, memory, and survival. Boats, often isolated in vast expanses of dark space, embodied the fragile hope of finding anchorage. The choice to keep the prints small and intimate invited close inspection, encouraging viewers to lean in and engage with the quiet tensions within the images.
On the other hand, I also studied Kibong Rhee’s works, which are always shrouded in mist—hillsides, trees, and water veiled in fog. “Water” and “mist” recur as motifs in Rhee’s oeuvre, symbolizing the ephemerality and flux of life. Trees, reeds, and ruins in his paintings often exist in a state of “becoming–dissipating,” suggesting that all things are in constant change, and viewers feel immersed in a realm that is both memory and imagination. Like a silent, cold, and damp dream, this haze blurs the boundary between the spiritual and the real. I had long assumed that this hazy effect was achieved using an airbrush or wet-on-wet watercolor techniques combined with layered masking. Later, when I watched a documentary on his work, I discovered that his surfaces are not merely flat oil or acrylic, but are built up with multiple layers of transparent polyester fiber or plexiglass, creating three-dimensional optical depth. This method produces an “emerge–disappear” effect at different viewing distances: from afar, one sees a dense mist; up close, one can discern the details of branches and leaves. This revelation was profoundly inspirational to me.
Plexiglas, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
120.5 × 120.5 cm
Acrylic and polyester on canvas
107 × 107 cm
When I revisit my own images—why did I choose birds and boats? How do objects carry abstract notions of emotion, history, memory, and identity? George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory posits that metaphor is not mere rhetoric but the starting point of cognitive mapping, a fundamental way humans understand the world. We extract relational structures from concrete objects or experiences and project them into abstract domains. This projection is not mechanical but grounded in core structures derived from our repeated experiences in the material world, making abstract thought more manipulable. But more often, the choice of metaphorical objects arises from cultural convention, such as roses for love or doves for peace—these objects’ meanings have long been entrenched and widely accepted within specific cultural contexts.
Yet metaphor is not a neutral tool; its use reflects discursive power and value orientations. On one hand, in cross-cultural communication, the same object metaphor can cause misunderstandings. In different cultures and societies, an object’s symbolic meaning may be entirely different. For example, doves symbolize peace in Western contexts but may evoke completely different associations in some Middle Eastern cultures. Given this, can we really assert that objects have universal, fixed symbolic meanings? Or does this assumption risk oversimplifying objects’ multidimensionality and ignoring individual and collective experiential differences?
On the other hand, childhood background, upbringing, and life experiences also shape an individual’s emotional connections and metaphorical interpretations of certain objects. From another perspective, the misunderstandings arising from these cognitive differences are not necessarily detrimental; in an appropriate context, such context-specific interpretations and sensations—rich in informational entropy—can be seen as extensions of artistic creation. Therefore, accepting multiple, context-specific interpretations requires us to adopt a more critical and inclusive approach to how objects operate within emotional, historical, and identity-based frameworks.
From a decolonial perspective, it becomes even more important to question the alleged universality of symbolic meanings. Historically, many objects’ symbolic meanings were defined, disseminated, and imposed by dominant cultures (often Western), suppressing or erasing local, indigenous, and alternative interpretations. In this sense, the act of assigning fixed meanings to objects can itself be viewed as part of the colonial legacy—an apparatus that privileges certain narratives while silencing others.
For example, in the paintings of Aboriginal Australian artist Rover Thomas, he makes extensive use of the motifs “earth crater” and “hunting tool.” A conventional Western reading might treat “hunting tools” as mere “tool metaphors” or “symbols of power,” but in the Gija context these signs point to ancestral ceremonial sites and the memory of Country. Thomas’s work not only subverts Western stereotypes about “the outback,” “tools,” and “ritual,” but also, through a “schema overlay” (literally imprinting the texture of the land onto the canvas), asserts land sovereignty and communal identity—an act of decolonial symbolic re-creation.
By contrast, my own use of the motifs “bird” and “boat” must also guard against potential cultural appropriation and power imbalances: I need to ask myself whether I have unwittingly projected a Western romantic narrative of “wandering” and “displacement” onto my own migrant experience. Or rather, I should more carefully examine the specific semantic layers that “flying birds” and “waterways” carry in different languages and communities, so as to establish a genuinely cross-cultural dialogue in my practice, rather than relying on a single Eastern framework.
References
- Ayón, B. (1991). Sikán [Collograph]. Fowler Museum at UCLA. (Artsy)
- Derrida, J. (1993). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge.
- Farr, I. (Ed.). (2012). Memory. MIT Press. (MIT Press)
- Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
- Marx, K. (1973). Critique of Adolph Wagner’s “Textbook of Political Economy”. In Marx & Engels Collected Works (Vol. 26, pp. 75–142). Lawrence & Wishart.
- Migration Museum. (2019, January 15). New Art Studio taking up residence in our Room to Breathe exhibition [Blog post]. Migration Museum. https://www.migrationmuseum.org/new-art-studio-taking-up-residence-in-our-room-to-breathe-exhibition/ (Migration Museum)
- Migration Museum. (n.d.). Room to Breathe [Exhibition page]. Migration Museum. https://www.migrationmuseum.org/event/room-to-breathe/ (Migration Museum)
- Meyer, D. (Ed.). (2016). A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age [Exhibition catalogue]. George Eastman Museum.
- Pelzer-Montada, R. (2008). The attraction of print: Notes on the surface of the (art) print. Art Journal, 67(2), 74–91. (research.ed.ac.uk)
- Rhee, K. (2024). Mistygraphy – Cut Sections 2–5 [Acrylic and polyester fiber on canvas]. Tina Kim Gallery. (IMPULSE Magazine)
- Thomas, R. (1995). Dumbi, Mook Mook [Natural earth pigments on canvas]. (invaluable.com)