Event Review: Displacement & Translation — Residency Open Studio
On June 7, residency artists Maria Positano and Ng Win Yi shared their reflections on spatial transition and identity migration developed in Nanjing.
Maria Positano’s practice explores the body through the imagery of armor. Inspired by her research into Eastern and Western armor typologies in Nanjing, she uses her own body as a model to construct new wearable structures from everyday materials. Her physical labor is central to the work, allowing vulnerability, defense, the personal, and the external to coexist. This intimate defense mechanism will further evolve into performative presentations in her upcoming exhibition at Sixi Art Museum.
Ng Win Yi’s work navigates a different displacement. Based in Lyon and born in Kuala Lumpur, her time in Nanjing sparked a friction between memory and environment. Through murals and sculptures, she blends local roof-guardian beasts and lion dances with Peranakan culture and colonial artifacts. These hybrid elements question cultural assimilation: how do segmented cultures truly merge after fracture? Ng searches for answers within the collision of tradition, import, the native, and the foreign.
Coming from different perspectives, Maria Positano and Ng Win Yi convey their contemporary reflections on Nanjing. Sixi Art Museum hopes that visitors can witness the individual's confrontation and reconciliation with the external world through these works, encouraging us to face an era of constant displacement with a more open, receptive posture.