Installation
The artist’s mother’s cremains, paper clay, wood, table, incense, fruit, and other miscellaneous objects
8½ × 8½ × 10 feet
The artist’s mother’s cremains, paper clay, wood, table, incense, fruit, and other miscellaneous objects
8½ × 8½ × 10 feet
Walk into a Chinese home and you may find an altar on a tiny shelf, a console table, or the upper area of a small cabinet. It may be filled with photos of a deity and/or loved ones that have died, incense, and fresh citrus to offer them, among other things to remember them by.
This is my contemporary take on a Chinese-American shrine for my mother. It includes some items that would appear in traditional Chinese-American domestic shrines, and also includes some of her favorite things.
You are invited to open the drawer of the table top I built to display my mother’s significant documents from different phases of her life. The outer drawer labels read “ခင်သန်းဝင်း”, “陳惠娥”, and “Peggy Chen” for the times she respectively called Myanmar, Taiwan, and the United States her home throughout her years.
Special thanks for the generosity of members of the Buy Nothing West Hartford (Central), CT Group, for donations of flowers.
And thanks to author, art historian, and cult legend Paul Koudounaris, PhD, for helping me realize there is no wrong way to honor the dead.
