1. The Repeated Beginning: Notes on Artistic Reintroduction
2. Looking at the museum through my own lens
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
The Repeated Beginning: Notes on Artistic Reintroduction
Chloë Cheuk May 9, 2026
As my solo exhibition organized by 1a space comes to an end, I find myself sitting in my studio in Montreal, simultaneously bidding farewell to an overseas exhibition while beginning a residency at Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. This transitional moment has generated a profound sense of contradiction. The exhibition received mixed responses, particularly in relation to the expectations associated with a “mid-career” exhibition. Many viewers felt that the exhibition did not fulfil what they anticipated such a presentation should represent.
However, regardless of the practical and structural constraints surrounding the exhibition, I believe the project already revealed how Yang Yeung, Christina Chung, and I approached the notion of “mid-career” itself. Although I was selected for the mid-career program, the exhibition intentionally resisted functioning as a retrospective of my most recognizable works. Many audiences expected to encounter works such as Since We Last Met, Dependence, or Burst of Pleasure, pieces that have undeniably become iconic within my artistic trajectory. Yet I continually found myself questioning the distinction between exhibiting one’s “strongest” works and constructing a mid-career exhibition. Are these necessarily the same thing?
Much of my artistic life has unfolded through conditions of instability and migration. During my ten years in Canada, I moved over eleven times and worked multiple jobs while attempting to establish a life in a foreign country. These experiences fundamentally transformed my understanding of art and artistic practice. The notion of presence became increasingly significant to me—not presence as spectacle, but as a lived condition shaped by precarity, adaptation, and survival. Existing within constant bureaucratic uncertainty required a continuous readiness for change, forcing me to develop tactical ways of navigating systems, institutions, and everyday life. These experiences gradually altered both my methodology and my conception of what an artist can be.
Canadian coins exchanged with homeless people
image credit to Wong Pak Hang
Polymer clay
image credit to Wong Pak Hang
For this reason, I have remained committed to an autobiographical approach within my practice. Rather than interpreting the past nostalgically or projecting toward speculative futures, I am more interested in confronting present realities directly. The exhibition, therefore, was not intended as a consolidation of past achievements, but rather as a reflection of who I am at this precise moment.
Over the course of nearly ten years in Canada, I had virtually no opportunity to develop my artistic career in a conventional sense due to the absence of permanent immigration status. During this period, I learned how to exist without fully inhabiting the identity of “artist.” Paradoxically, this condition also relieved me from certain pressures associated with professionalization and artistic branding. In working with Yang Yeung and Christina Chung, we revisited the question of what it means to be an artist under such fragmented conditions. Together, they assembled fragments of my lived experiences and re-narrated them into an exhibitionary form.
While audiences may have expected the exhibition to reaffirm a familiar image of “Chloe,” the figure they anticipated has already shifted through an invisible trajectory of migration, displacement, and institutional discontinuity. The most contradictory aspect of this experience lies in the contrast between Hong Kong and Montreal. In Hong Kong, the exhibition appeared to function as a conclusion or summary of my artistic practice; meanwhile, in Montreal, my residency at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal marks the first time a Canadian institution has formally introduced my work into the Canadian art context. After returning to Canada from Hong Kong, I experienced the unsettling sensation of beginning my artistic career all over again.
This repeated process of reintroduction has itself become another form of fragmentation. The divergence between the Hong Kong and Canadian art contexts is particularly revealing: the Hong Kong art scene often privileges production, visibility, and iconic works, while the broader social and biographical contexts surrounding artistic practice are frequently overlooked. Few viewers engage deeply with the accompanying texts or the conditions that shape the work beyond its visual outcome. As a result, discontinuities emerge repeatedly—not because of personal inconsistency, but because the contexts surrounding artistic production are rarely taken seriously as part of the work itself.
The exhibition, therefore, was not intended as a consolidation of past achievements, but rather as a reflection of who I am at this precise moment.
This refusal of resolution also manifested materially within the exhibition itself. Works such as Unfinished Placement were conceived not as completed sculptural statements, but as open-ended conditions. Composed of soap and concrete, the work stages a tension between two materially incompatible substances that remain physically and chemically unstable. The ongoing process of saponification prevents the work from arriving at a fixed state, allowing transformation to continue beyond the moment of exhibition. In this sense, Unfinished Placement does not symbolize incompletion metaphorically; rather, incompletion becomes embedded within the material logic of the work itself.
This approach extends to other works in the exhibition, including Waiting for Another Round and Scattering Journey, which similarly remain capable of growth, accumulation, and reconfiguration over time. Rather than treating the exhibition as a site for presenting finalized objects, I approached it as a temporary arrangement within an ongoing process.
The condition of being repeatedly reintroduced into different cultural and institutional contexts has also shaped my understanding of artistic form itself. Increasingly, I have become suspicious of the expectation that artworks must appear resolved, stable, and self-contained. Such expectations often mirror the logic of commodity display, where completion becomes necessary for circulation and consumption. In contrast, works like Unfinished Placement resist closure, remaining contingent, unstable, and continuously negotiable.
Unfinished Placement (front), handmade soap, concrete, bricks found on site of Cattle Depot
Waiting for Another Round (back), two channels video loop 6min
Perhaps the contradiction I experienced between audience expectations and the exhibition itself does not reveal a failure of the exhibition, but rather exposes the limitations of how artistic careers are commonly understood. If transnational life is fundamentally shaped by interruption, instability, repeated adaptation, and fragmented visibility, then why must a “mid-career” exhibition still be expected to present a coherent, resolved, and finalized artistic identity? Perhaps works such as Unfinished Placement are not incomplete failures awaiting resolution, but reflections of a condition in which neither the artwork, the artist, nor the exhibition can ever fully arrive at a fixed state. If institutions themselves continuously renegotiate meaning, display, and context throughout an exhibition period, then why do we continue to approach exhibitions as stable and completed forms rather than as evolving conditions of negotiation, presence, and becoming?
Montréal