You said we’d meet again if fate willed it, 2023
Stained white oak, photo transparencies, brass 
92 x 79 x 3”

You said we’d meet again if fate willed it draws inspiration from the tragic heroines of atmospheric films by Stanley Kwan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, and Wong Kar-wai. Set between the 1880s and 1960s in Shanghai and Hong Kong, these characters navigate shifting expectations of womanhood shaped by war, politics, and modernization while seeking love, autonomy, and self-determination. Many are associated with flowers through their names, costumes, or visual motifs. The patterned textiles they wear become extensions of their inner lives, revealing desires and emotions that often contrast with the domestic spaces that contain them.

In Kwan’s Rouge, Fleur’s longing for the freedom to love whom she chooses is echoed through motifs of butterflies and dragonflies moving in every direction. Her social immobility is underscored in scenes where she applies makeup against wallpaper covered in rigid, repeating floral patterns. In Kwan’s Center Stage, Ruan Lingyu dazzles on screen in elaborate costumes, yet as her private life becomes the subject of public scrutiny, she appears to dissolve into the ornate interiors of her home, as if wishing to disappear. The title of this work is drawn from Fleur’s story in Rouge, where she returns as a ghost searching for answers about her former life, occupying a liminal state between presence and absence. By creating an object through which viewers look and move between foreground and background, the work evokes this unstable condition of being visible and invisible, object and subject, interior and performed.

Installation photos by Darren Rigo.