Looking at the museum through my own lens

Chloë Cheuk Sept 18, 2026

The residency at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal has come to an end. For me, it was a chance to spend time inside a museum without having to begin with an artwork or a collection. Instead, I wanted to look at what was happening around them: the people, procedures, rooms, objects, rules, and small things that allow a museum to function every day.

The museum was also a strange place for me to be doing this research. It is far from where I grew up, in Hong Kong, but being there made me think more deeply about where I come from and how I have learned to see institutions.

I was born in 1989. In 1997, Hong Kong was handed over from British to Chinese sovereignty. I grew up during this transition and became aware, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, of how decisions made by governments and institutions can enter people's lives. I don't see this residency as a political statement about Hong Kong, and I deliberately did not want to make that history the subject of my research. But I also cannot pretend that it has nothing to do with the way I look at the world.

Perhaps because of this, I tend to notice what happens when people enter a system.

The first thing that caught my attention at the museum was the cloakroom tag.

They are simple objects: identical pieces of plastic or cardboard with numbers on them, given to visitors when they leave their belongings behind. There is nothing particularly interesting about them at first. But I started thinking about how familiar this situation felt.

We queue. We hand something over. We receive a number. We wait. We follow a procedure. We are processed.

I thought about immigration, applications, driving tests, examinations, and all the other moments when we have to enter a system and allow ourselves to be identified by it.

For a moment, we become a number.

The scratches and marks on the cloakroom tags changed the way I looked at them. They were no longer identical. Each mark suggested that someone had held that particular tag, carried it, dropped it, scratched it, or kept it in a pocket.

Behind the number was a person.

I became interested in that small contradiction: a system needs to make things orderly and identifiable, but the people moving through it are never quite as orderly as the system makes them appear.

This feeling became stronger when I spent time with the conservation department.

I learned that when conservators repair an object, the repair should remain reversible. Even when a fracture can be made almost invisible, the intervention should not simply disappear. It should remain possible to distinguish what is original from what has been added later.

I found this surprisingly moving.

Repairing something does not necessarily mean making it look as though it was never broken.

The fracture remains part of its history.

The conservators showed me how much information can be contained in something that might otherwise be considered damaged. A crack, a separation, an old repair, a change in material—these things can tell a story about where an object has been and what has happened to it.

The condition report is part of how this history stays with the object.

It follows the object over time, recording changes, damage, previous repairs, materials and treatments. Someone working on the same object years later can look back at this record and understand what happened before.

I started thinking of the condition report almost as a memory attached to an object.

I wanted to understand this process more personally, so I brought a Polaroid photograph of my family from Hong Kong. It is more than twenty years old and is probably one of the most personal analogue objects I have.

I placed it in the hands of a conservator.

For approximately two hours, I watched her examine it. She looked closely at the surface, the edges, the image, the material. She assessed its condition and wrote a condition report.

I found the process fascinating, but also strange.

This photograph carries memories for me that cannot really be written into a condition report. The conservator could carefully describe what was physically there, but the personal meaning of the photograph existed somewhere else.

The photograph was being translated.

It entered the conservation department as a personal object and became, for a moment, a museum object. Its history had to become legible through another language.

I began to recognize something familiar in that process.

I have experienced similar translations through immigration.

A relationship can be deeply personal, but when it enters an immigration system, it may need to become photographs, correspondence, documents, dates, addresses and other forms of evidence. A life has to become something that can be read and verified by an institution.

I experienced this myself when my work and activities had to be documented as part of my immigration process in Canada. Years of living and working could not simply be understood as lived experience. They had to become evidence.

This is where my experience of Hong Kong, my experience of immigration, and my time at the museum began to meet.

I became interested in the quiet moments when a person or an object enters a system and has to be translated into a form that the system can understand.

A cloakroom tag.

A condition report.

An immigration document.

A number.

A record.

None of these things are necessarily oppressive or negative on their own. In fact, they can be useful. They allow institutions to organize, care for, preserve, and manage things. But each system also has its own language, and there are always things that cannot completely fit inside that language.

This was perhaps what I was looking for during the residency.

Not the museum's collection, but the things that happen around it.

The people who look after the objects. The people who move through the building. The tags, reports, records, rules and procedures that we normally don't notice.

I wanted to see what happens when we look at these ordinary things closely.

And perhaps, through looking at the infrastructure of the museum, I was also looking at the infrastructures that have shaped my own life.

I came to the museum from Hong Kong, but I was also looking at it from Montréal. Between these places, and between the different systems I have moved through, I have learned to pay attention to the moments when a person becomes a number, when a memory becomes a document, when damage becomes history, and when something personal has to find a way to become legible to someone else.

The residency gave me the time and space to look at these moments without needing to immediately turn them into answers.

For me, that was the research.

Montréal