THRESHOLD OF MEMOIRS

Yim Yen Sum’s textile and fabric works have explored issues connected to the notion of time and space, traversing themes from the discourse of urbanism, history, memory, to the social body. In Threshold of Memoirs , the artist revisits her sustained exploration of these themes and of her chosen medium. Her main entry point is the imagination of the home and building, and more specifically, her observation of the “window” as both an object and the threshold of social space.

Here, Yen Sum is interested in testing the expansion of these boundaries as pliable lines and connections. The window, the main visual object in the present series, represents one site in which the artist noticed the potential for lines to give way during the lockdown. In the artist’s observation, windows became focused spaces where people engaged with the outside world, or gates from which they longed to reach and to reconnect with their peers.

In her present installation, the windows are combined with forms of mountains, placing nature and the man-made in juxtaposition. The contrast is made evident by the use of gold thread to represent mountains, sewed against the black thread of her windows. Again, the pandemic has changed the way we connect to the environment: isolated in a concrete cube, we look outward to imagine more. Interestingly, by choosing a transparent material for her fabric, Yen Sum also challenges the perception of walls as concrete forms as something more open and engaging. The transparency invites the potential for open boundaries.

Such conversations look to other important frameworks that recur across the artist’s oeuvre, namely the associations of womanhood and femininity weaved into her fabric works. Yen Sum’s interest in working with fabric drew from her fascination in traditional art forms relating to fluidity and continuity. Yen Sum displays her works as a stretched version of a long handscroll embroidery of windows and mountains surrounding all the walls of the gallery space, both of which have resonance as recurring metaphors in traditional Chinese paintings, with narratives of home and memories.

The performative aspect of Yen Sum’s process will be on show during the exhibition, where Yen Sum will conduct a silent sewing performance in the gallery space. The artist’s performance lays bare the artist’s memories and emotions; she builds a silent dialogue between herself and the audience to show how the process from a single thread slowly layers to become a window then another. In this way, the artist seems to perform the process of a growing life form, beginning with a single cell that slowly becomes an embryo, which then becomes a person, and then through networking finally evolves into a society.

Alia Swastika, Curator , 2021

Alia Swastika is a curator and writer based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She is now Director of Biennale Jogja Foundation, where she served for curator in previous editions. In 2007–2018 she was the Program Director for Ark Galerie in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, then she transformed the platform to a farming and studio based residency in a village in Yogyakarta.

Line of Connection

2020

Gauze dyed in acrylic, embroidery on gauze 16 × 1279 cm

Threshold of Memoirs series

2021–ongoing

Gauze dyed in acrylic, embroidery on gauze

Dimension variable

Threshold of Memoirs series

2021–ongoing

Gauze dyed in acrylic, embroidery on gauze

Dimension variable