The Heart of Home—Where Is Home
It reflects 4C Gallery's dedication to artistic concepts and its humanistic care for the diaspora community.
Words by Annie Li Yangyang
"Home is not a place, but a feeling." The group exhibition The Heart of Home opened on April 8th at the 4C Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition presents the diverse perspectives and deconstructions of the concept of "home" by Chinese diaspora artists, showcasing their collective living conditions and spiritual worlds based on their cultural backgrounds. It reflects 4C Gallery's dedication to artistic concepts and its humanistic care for the diaspora community. Living in the US, artists are thousands of miles away from their homes, facing both cultural and linguistic barrier that make it difficult for their work to gain the attention they deserve in mainstream American galleries. Therefore, the mission of 4C Gallery is to provide a respectable platform for Chinese artists and audiences caught between two cultures, nurturing their own cultural space.
At the opening ceremony of "The Heart of Home," attending artists, art practitioners, and enthusiasts engaged in lively discussions and exchanged ideas. Artists showcased their works, explained their artistic concepts, and interacted with the audience. By providing opportunities for artists and their works, the event also promoted local art and cultural exchanges. With this ideal in mind, 4C Gallery will provide a long-term, professional art exhibition space for Chinese-speaking artists in Los Angeles, organizing various cultural activities, and building a unique "home."
40,149 Photos, 3,737 Videos
In the experimental family space created by the Dafei art collective, "home" is no longer defined by blood relations but by friendships and a shared living space. Family members include several people and a few cats, with their 24-hour activity trajectories presented on a single map. As the audience discusses and attempts to identify who these trajectories belong to and how they are formed, they are also exploring the narrative of a home. Such non-blood-related, chosen families are common among the diaspora community, and moments of warmth flow when the individual paths intersect.
Yanyi Xie also approaches the theme of "home" from a daily perspective in her work 13 Hours. She combines her parents' daily videos shot in China, her own life footage in the United States, and video calls with her parents. When we see the parents' awkward yet genuine filming techniques, we are all touched by her deeply personal narrative and reminded of our own parents and families. This piece discusses the continuation of affection and home through communication technologies, transcending time and space.
The Sighing Me, 3D Animation, 2023, Stills 2
Re- formation, Shadow Evolution, Mixed Media
Yafei Faye Liu's Goldfish explores the familiarity and strangeness of Chinatown as an "artificial homeland." In Flushing, the Chinese district of New York, she feels as if "looking at goldfish in a shiny plastic aquarium." Although the scenery in Flushing seems extremely familiar to someone of Chinese origin, it is merely an artificial utopia where everything becomes an object of observation. Like the uncanny valley effect, this seemingly familiar yet fake "home" fails to bring comfort but only triggers panic, loneliness, and alienation.
This idea resonates with Shi Ruoyi's multi-media series One Precise Hug. At the beginning of the artist's life in the United States, she was unfamiliar with the imperial measurement system. She recalls her father's fondness for a particular tree in her hometown, and she remembers that the tree was the exact size of her arms wrapped around it with her fingertips touching. Thus, she created a new unit of measurement, "one precise hug." She searched for trees in the United States that were the same size as "her father's tree" and found many that met the standard. As her work creates a humanized, humanistic measurement system, it prompts us to consider these questions: Does the same measurement of two trees imply their sameness? Can embracing a tree of the same size bring one back to the tree at home? Can a home be replicated?
Excitement, Oil & Arcylic on canvas, 2022
The Blossom of Dawn
Mao Yu's Secret Space is a corner of personal memories, accompanied by the background sound of Wenzhou dialect and nursery rhymes. In her personal narrative, she also pays attention to the collective aspect, as the younger generation, including the artist, cannot speak the dialect as fluently as their parents. The concept of "home" rooted in the mastery of a specific language is slowly fading away.
Yiran Zhang also presents more abstract themes from a personal performance perspective. The artist shattered a piece of tofu and then attempted to sew it together with a needle and thread, but the tofu continued to break. She uses this Sisyphean futile metaphor to convey the futility of repairing relationships and the inevitable fragility of human emotions, with the entire scene being silent and austere. What kind of home is perfect and flawless anyway?
The Rest, Mineral pigment on paper, 2022
Photography works, 37.01*51.18 inches
Zaozao Echo Zhang's installation work uses the narrative of witch mythology to provide explosive catharsis for women trapped and silenced in their families. The intricate combination of volcano, female body, and divine tree totems creates powerful and dynamic surreal images that declare this space to be exclusively for women. The mirrored surface reflects the audience's eyes, as if under the gaze of the volcanic goddess. In Yi Wang's work on mother-daughter relationships, the bond between mothers and daughters is both close and distant, which reminds us of the protagonist and his mother in The Stranger by Albert Camus. "Mom, I don't live in your heart." No matter how close the parent-child relationship is, they are still separate individuals, and children eventually must grow up. The blood-related "home" is both solid and elusive.
Ruoxi Rosie Li's work, through the study of the culture and history of "Nüshu" (women's script), showcases the female voices within the family space. Home is not only a space where affection exists but has long been a territory dominated by clan power, patriarchy, and husband power. The placement of objects decided by men is a microcosm of male dominance, while the nearly vision-blocking physical table in front of the paintings transforms the pictorial space into a part of the exhibition space, reminding us of the omnipresence of male oppression. The combination of Nüshu and other totemic images with oppressive images represents resistance to thought control and healing within one's personal space.
Peach Throne
Photography works, 37.01*51.18 inches
In Ruoxin Sun's I Don't Know What I Know, the newly redeveloped parts of the city are erased from the map by her, revealing the original appearance she recognizes. The map is a fictional projection of physical space, and the artist's act of erasing part of the map is like a futile ritual trying to restore the city to its original state, as well as a tribute to the lost urban memories. Xintong Blady Liu's photography series A nail pinned in time is based on a nail in an old rural house, as if permanently fixing the memories of the countryside at a specific moment. The photos feature the long-uninhabited empty rooms, the rusty old mirrors, and the dilapidated kitchens once used for social gatherings. This series, starting from personal family stories, explores the impact of urbanization on rural communities and individual families on a larger scale, and echoes the fascination with ruins in Chinese tradition.
In Siyan Camille Ji 's photography series, her hometown of Daqing is presented as an abandoned industrial city, a "ghost town." She asked people around her what they think of when they think of Daqing and used their responses as a basis for her creation. The most precious memory of the city is setting off fireworks with her father. Through narrative images, she explores the subtle connections between personal family memories and collective environments. During the creation process, she also drew inspiration from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. As Calvino wrote, " Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey." As time goes by, "home" is no longer a tangible entity, but a flowing river, a distant mountain in the mist, or a falling firework.
Peach Throne
Far away from their hometowns, dispersed artists in the United States use their unique perceptions and expressions to reconstruct the concept of "home" through memories, communication media, specific locations or characteristics. In the group exhibition The Heart of Home, works of different media including film, installation, performance, and painting convey the artists' understanding of "home" and their interpretation of a series of relevant concepts: memories, love, parent-child relationships, urbanization of rural areas, women's rights, strangeness...All pieces come together to form a blend of personal and collective memories.
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