Darning

Ghosts in the Family

Ghosts in the Family was a writing workshop co-hosted by Toni Brell and myself in 2021. The workshop was centred around the role of storytelling and fiction from queer, feminist and diaspora perspecti ...

Unmendable

+ how to mend motherhood and it’s ghosts+ fragments of repair.

Conspiracy

We tell stories about ourselves and about each other all the time. Our stories are conspiracy theories, they try to make sense of our loved ones in ways that protect our own vanity, sense of worth, di ...

Graphic Medicine

As challenging as it has been for me to receive some of her drawings, they have inadvertently bridged our language barrier. In this poignant way, her images have become our new mode of communication, ...

Su Hui's reversible poem

Embodied Publishing

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Embodied Knowledges

Our bodies are the text that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation. Katie CannonI would like to start at a place where I had ignored for the longest part of my lif ...

NNN Fair

In June 2021, Serenity Department participated in the NON NATIVE NATIVE FAIR, an online event that brought together Asian creative cultural practitioners from various backgrounds and disciplines to pa ...

Empathy

Writing and storytelling has become an empathy device – to imagine myself in the shoes and body of someone else. Perhaps it is the old school virtual reality lens. It has been helpful for me to role p ...

Qiaopi

Looking in the Goblin Mirror, Liminal

A piece I wrote on the subject of mirror for Liminal Mag, an Australian anti-racist literary platform with a focus on the Asian Australian experience. Link here🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞🪞 ...

Eating and drinking and drunk again!

Signed 3.1.2020

There is Love and Hate

This drawing represents her getting scolded and insulted at the hands of her crooked and venomous family members. The blue hand in the sky represents larger society. She told me that the floating mout ...

Kraplap

Looking in the Goblin Mirror

Latest drawing made by mother. You can read about the drawing in this piece I wrote for Liminal Mag with the same name, Looking in the Goblin Mirror.Signed August 2022

Profit-making in "$" American dollars, the power of the military game

Signed 20.10.2019

Deep Listening

From intellectualising to listening

Hanfu

Going to Australia

This is first image my mother made for this project. It depicts her dragging a shell with a suitcase and her tiny doll daughter peeking out of it. My mother told me that the shell represents a good fa ...

Dad's ass was bitten by mosquitoes!

Signed 10.9.2019

Happy Chinese New Year!

Signed 25.12.2019

Joss paper

Mending as Making

My recent practice can be defined under the umbrella practice of mending, an embodied practice of stitching the ruptured binaries that have been violently torn apart over hundreds of years by what bel ...

Intergenerational Trauma

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Intergenerational Self

Da Wo

Good morning China!

‘Good morning china’. This is my mum’s vision of the past. While poverty was nation wide and people laboured all day long under the hot sun represented by the naked bodies in the mountains, her spirit ...

Frame

together with my assistant (who is born in China, assists me doing translation work, both linguistically and culturally), we’ve done design research into objects that reveal and conceal, or somehow to ...

Navel expanding

How did the expression ‘navel-gazing’ evolve to mean self-indulgent introspection, where it once meant a form of contemplation about the cosmos through the navel? The term ‘navel-gazing’ derives from ...

Spectral Publishing

i write to the unconscious (spiritual) part of me, history, past, present (this is spectral publishing). That is my audience. (Immortal and mortal.)I’m interested in exploring the ghost of intergenera ...

Storytelling

I’ve been grappling with finding a way to talk and write about her. As an artistic researcher embedded in Western art and design institutional traditions, my default approach was to intellectually jus ...

Immersion

I've been doing interviews with my mother about each of her drawings. The process felt like we were jumping into her drawings where they became glowing portals to the painful past, into another dimens ...

Buddhist symbols

Ghostwriting

In doing this work, the figure of ghost has come into the project, guiding me to new places.I’ve always had this cruel inner voice, however lately, my relationship to it has changed.I’ve known for a w ...

Dear Ursula, A Tale of a Tub

Dear Ursula is the first chapter of Serenity Department, an intergenerational mending collaboration two years in the making between my mother Maria Ling Qing Huang, and myself.My mother and her aesthe ...