LOST OBJECTS

Featuring Artists: Heesoo Kwon, Cathy Lu, Sherwin Rio, and Andrew Sungtaek, Co-organized by Tracy Ren and Jess Young @ CTRL+SHFT Collective

Lost Objects is an exhibition that brings together six artists of the Asian diaspora, all working to reconstruct familial and cultural objects, ideals, and histories; to reclaim and reimagine that which has been lost to the oppressive powers of colonial and patriarchal systems. Through the physical and conceptual manipulation of material culture, craft processes, and virtual space, we both confront and critique our individual experiences with ambiguous loss while redefining our place within the social imaginary. By processing and (re)materializing these losses, we attempt to reorient and reclaim our identities as constituents of a whole.

Lost Objects is inspired largely by the psychoanalytic essay, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia, by David L. Eng, Ph.D. and Shinhee Han, C.S.W., in which the authors reframe Freud's privileged theory of mourning and melancholia to contextualize the ambiguous losses caused by nature of existing outside dominant norms. They call this new theory "racial melancholia", a phenomenon they address more specifically within the Asian-American community, a community that has been historically excluded, silenced, and estranged by colonial structures under a guise of assimilative success also known as the model minority stereotype. Though they shed light on a difficult reality, Eng and Han also provide us with a hopeful perspective, one that positions melancholic minorities as activists rather than victims.

In this exhibition we aim to bring forth the representative power in the individual and the collective, to (re)build ourselves as a community through the knowledge we have gathered. We uphold Jose Esteban Muñoz's words that melancholia is, "a mechanism that helps us (re)construct identity and take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names – and in our names [p. 74]" (694).