Join us Saturday, August 8 from 6–7:30 pm for the opening of 归舟: Longings, Returns with a performance by artist Sim Chi Yin.
This exhibition and performance-installation takes its title from gui zhou, or “homeward-bound vessel,” a recurring motif in classical Chinese poetry evoking an unfulfilled wish for return. This figure of longing becomes the lens to unsettle the intersecting geographies of forced migration and removal stemming from mass deportations in British-ruled Malaya. In her ongoing research, Sim complicates the historiography of the anti-colonial war in Malaya through photography, film, oral histories, and archival intervention. Together these materials reveal the mass deportation of over 30,000 people—mostly ethnic Chinese—from Malaya to China between 1948 and 1960 as a suppressed chapter of colonial counterinsurgency, waged under Cold War emergency legislation. This mass banishment survives only in the chain of paperwork the colonial state used to dispose of those it cast as leftists and their sympathizers.
Sim’s new commission situates us within the boundless, ungovernable, fluid space of the sea. Her paternal grandfather was an educator and newspaper editor who was sent into exile in China, which was then in the midst of civil war. He was executed shortly after arrival. Left behind in Malaya, his mother, wife, and five children would never speak of him again. A silence festered quietly within the family for six decades, which Sim now works to address, probing and performing multiple forms of return for those banished. In looking back, she signals a longer lineage of forced migration practices stretching from colonial to contemporary times—asking what repair might mean for those whose safe passage continues to be denied.
