Transmigration Inadequacy – St. John’s Project (2009)
Jing Yuan Huang
March 14 – April 12, 2009
Opening reception: Friday March 13, 8pm
Artist Talk: March 15, 2pm
As an immigrant to Canada and later to the United States, Huang is both a participant and a keen observer of how identity is attached to place. Her interests are in the results achieved by removing people/objects from specific spaces. Originally from China, Huang has, as child and an adult, by force and by choice, been up-rooted or removed from one region/country to another. The artist’s transitory lifestyle is the focus of her art practice.
Existing in a state of neither this nor that, Huang’s installation Transmigrating Inadequacy applies the theory of liminality. A conscious state of living that is on the threshold between two different existential planes, liminality provides Huang and her audience with a way to understand the experiences of immigration. Her exhibition, Transmigrating Inadequacy , captures and confronts feelings of disorientation, dislocation, and finally resolution through the voice of a self-proclaimed diasporic immigrant to North America.
Excerpt from a text by Amber Andersen, Curator, Exhibtions and Education, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, 2008