Growing up amidst the Southeast Asian diasporic tales (南洋华侨故事) of a distant homeland, as told by my grandpa, who comes from and lives near the port of Zhangling Gu Gang (樟林古港), an ancient port known to the diasporic community that emigrated to Southeast Asia. These tales influenced my upbringing and left me with an unexplainable longing to search and an urge to continue listening to those unfinished tales from afar.
The “Root Carry Temple” project was more of a surprise or the culmination of an exploration that began with an encounter with Asian Artemisia plants in the Dutch landscape. This encounter later led to the discovery of the Cambodian Teochew diaspora community in Paris and their family tales spanning generations. The exhibition showcases the research through installation, print, and storytelling-based recordings and embodies foraging as a methodology, tracing and unearthing intertwined narratives among "non-natives," the Asian Artemisia species, and the marginalized diasporic communities. Leveraging the Chinese ethnographic significance of Artemisia, embody it as a metaphor to emphasize the stories of Cambodian-Teochew diasporic women who gather in the temple of the 13th arrondissement in Paris.
During this research, I spent a month in Paris staying connected with the community both the youth and elder generation, having meaningful conversations and meetings thinking about care identity and cultural preservation. The younger generation of the Teochew diaspora showed me the importance of connection and archiving for a diasporic, while the women in the temple showed me the meaning of resistance in the margin.
