The museum built with spoken words

We are looking at displays of daily objects.

What does an exhibition say when it presents a drink can labeled with unfamiliar Mandarin words, a keyring, a refrigerator magnet and an eco-friendly metal straw? Does this exhibition glorify everyday life while resisting spectacle? The work is not ultimately aiming to re-challenge “defamiliarization”, which has been attempted multiple times by others. If we say the scenes in this gallery are trivial, the word ‘trivial’ is an antonym of ‘minute’, rather than ‘dazzling’. The exhibition delves into conceptions and perceptions of the Sinosphere.

Artist Salty Xi Jie Ng has stayed for about two weeks in the Yeonhui area to visit Taiwanese-run restaurants and a school. She interviewed Taiwanese-identifying people who currently live in Seoul to understand Taiwanese identity and what it means in Korean society. Furthermore, she invited them to share an object of significance to them as Taiwanese, which could serve as an answer to her primary question around identity, belonging, and lineage.

The items on the red and blue coloured shelves are these donations. Through them we encounter their contributors — self-identified Taiwanese living in Seoul, such as: a musician who studied Korean classical music, the art teacher of the largest overseas Chinese school in Korea, who was a reporter of overseas Chinese affairs for a Taiwanese TV station; a Taiwanese woman married to a Chinese-Korean man who helped her daughter open a restaurant featuring her traditional recipes — (hi)stories that are at times mundane, at times harsh. Listening to their stories carefully is significant. However, we do not hunt for sentimentality or severe hardship. The temperature of those stories keeps moving along like ocean currents affected by multiple boundaries. Salty could be one of the waves as a third-generation member of the global Chinese diaspora. From there she received perspectives which reached Singapore and South China region, her family land. She majorly speaks English as her mother tongue, even though she can speak ‘Mandarin Chinese’, usually known as the North Chinese language, and ‘Hokkien’, described as a dialect of Fujian province in South China and Taiwan. Her interest in the family’s cultural identity moves towards the similarity of hereditary transmission; during this transition she discovered that Taiwan could be the place that connects both Singapore and China, informing her ancestral investigation. Incidentally, many Taiwanese in Korea are living around Yeonhui-dong where the exhibition is sited, and where the artist anchors her research in the overseas-Chinese community.