Reparo
Curated by Yuan Shi
Artists: Elinor Carucci, Jingyao Huang, Lee Kai Chung, Ziqin Min, Wandering Eyes
April 14 - 27, 2022
"Reparo" is the name of a charm in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, which is used to seamlessly repair broken objects and worked on almost everything, yet it could only be used on inanimate objects, or it would cause serious scarring. The exhibition Reparo borrows the spell as a metaphor of repairing methods for both individual and social repair. Psychological repair involves perception and reflection on one's memories and experiences, rather than simply forgetting and concealing them, and requires both internal motivation of the victims and external attention and help. Similar to the individual's self-healing, making effort to heal collective trauma and recovering from a damaged situation to a better state of development is a process of material repair and spiritual reconciliation. Thus, social repair depends on the identification and judgment of the social problems caused by the trauma, relies on infrastructure reconstruction and sound social systems, and requires appropriate methods to deal with collective memory and post-traumatic ideology.
Reparo will include artworks that show processes and methods of individual and social repair in different contexts and narratives. Ziqin Min's Self-Healing series (2020-2021) includes 2 installations and two necklaces that using precious metal to repair the broken Western ornaments to suggest his personal experiences of cultural adaptation and the struggle with self-identification. Jingyao Huang's Chaotic Data Fences, Baraka, and the Cityscape (2021-2022) is a group of installations that based on a series of accidental corrupted nature photographs took during the Covid-19 quarantine period, whose incompleteness had been preserved as an artistic reproduction of the traumatized psychology. In Elinor Carucci's Silver Linings (2021) photograph series, the artist focuses on women from different cultural backgrounds who cannot dye their hair as planned during the quarantine period but finally embrace their true self. In the Wandering Eyes (2020-) project, the education volunteer organization Shaonianxiang has collected digital cameras from the community to give to rural students and taught them basic photography techniques and concepts to help them freely photograph, record their lives, and express themselves. Lee Kai Chuang's video project The Retrieval, Restoration, and Predicament (2018) focuses on the circulation of monumental materials during the World War II and the monumental sculptures as the vessel of collective memory, political symbolization and visual presentation of colonialism.
The exhibition Reparo offers alternative processes and methods of social repair in different contexts and narratives, stimulating discussions and perceptions on the changing identity, experience, and memory of individuals, communities, nations, and the world.