Cloud Chamer is the first institutional solo exhibition of my collective Art Labor, taking place at Para Site in Hong Kong. We decide to showcase the collective practice in collaboration with our long-term Jrai community and some artist friends, together with our individual artworks.
The exhibition ‘Cloud Chamber’ presents Art Labor’s long-term historical research, poetic observations, and decade-long practice of relationship-building with the Jrai community in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Alongside Art Labor’s newly commissioned and existing works, the exhibition features artwork from Jrai artists, with whom the collective has created collaborative projects since 2016, archival material from a missionary-turned-anthropologist in the French colonial period, and works by contemporary artists inspired by the region.
By reframing the region beyond its turbulent past, ‘Cloud Chamber’ looks to engage the audience in an imaginative reflection on the region’s complex history and its ongoing impact, from war, industrialisation, to the lingering effects of missionary activity. The exhibition title ‘Cloud Chamber’ alludes to the duality of matter and antimatter reacting to one another, a concept echoed by reincarnation beliefs in indigenous cosmologies of the Central Highlands. Expanding on this duality like a gravitational field, the exhibition explores the interplay of opposing forces—regeneration and destruction, modernity and tradition, reality and dream—that continues to shape the complex dynamics and ever-changing landscape of the Central Highlands today.