Exhibition Opening: Blooming While Withering by Rebecca Wang 王晨釔 with artist led tour | Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden

This exhibition brings together photographic works that delve into the construction and negotiation of selfhood within a contemporary diasporic context through partly autobiographical narratives. The presentation features a mix of film, digital, and phone images taken since 2016, incorporating texts dating back to the artist’s first arrival in Canada in 2004. Accompanied by olfactory and audio elements tied to personal memories, Blooming While Withering creates a multi-sensory experience.

These combined elements trace a journey of revelation, driven by a desire to document seemingly insignificant everyday moments through which life subtly unfolds. By reactivating and assembling these moments – of doubt, self-persuasion, perseverance, desperation, rebellion, surrender, reconciliation, and renewal – they are transformed to generate new meanings and possibilities.

This personal archive, where original contexts and meanings are reappropriated, mirrors the artist’s ongoing negotiation with a fragmented and transitional sense of belonging. Both revealing and concealing, the works act as ledgers or indexes of moments of becoming – whether significant, pivotal, mundane, or intimate. What is lost in translation – both between languages and through the re-enactment of memory – re-emerges in new forms, illuminating the fluid and shifting contours of identity in the diasporic experience.