Jessica Wee, Phuong Nguyen, & Hidenori Ishii
A Familiar Distance

In A Familiar Distance at TIAN Contemporain, artists Jessica Wee, Phuong Nguyen, and Hidenori Ishii, each from a different Asian cultural background (Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese, respectively), offered distinct but interconnected approaches to still life and sculpture. In their works, they meditate on movement and stillness, dislocation and presence, fantasy and reality. Rather than asserting a fixed narrative, the exhibition invited a tender, open-ended reflection on diasporic stories and subjectivity in today’s increasingly globalized context.

On a carefully balanced tea table draped with a vibrant yellow cloth, tea pours itself from a glass beaker beside macaroons and oranges, while Mudan flowers bloom vividly in the background. For a moment, I found myself wondering how much of this scene was pure fabrication. Korean-American-Canadian artist Jessica Wee’s works incorporate movement into dreamlike still life vignettes: bunnies pounding rice mochi, a figure mid-flight with legs in the air. Her culturally and geographically coded arrangements of fruit, flowers, sweets, and household objects invite the viewer to investigate and decode the layered stories behind these ambiguous scenes. My mind harkened back to moments such as sharing laughter with Dad at a tea table or picking out fruits in a farmer’s market back in China, details around which have since blurred. Analogous to the memories of diasporic subjects, these scenes feel familiar yet fantastical, distant yet tangible.