Through video, soft sculpture and fragile paper props, the exhibition traces how a shared family ailment – haemorrhoids – opens onto intergenerational trauma, shame, humour and healing within an Asian migrant family.
Across video, soft sculpture and fragile paper props, Bobby traces how pain settles in the body when it cannot be spoken aloud. In many East Asian families, love is expressed indirectly and difficult emotions are swallowed rather than shared. Here, a shared physical vulnerability within the Yu family becomes a way of talking about shame, anger and exhaustion that have long remained unaddressed. The works invite visitors to sit, lean and lie down, and to feel how stories of illness, debt, war and migration lodge themselves in the muscles and nervous system.
The exhibition is built around three major film works. Paradise Air, shot during an artist residency in Chiba, Japan, drifts silently through the former love hotel Paradise AIR, now an artist residency above a pachinko parlour. The camera moves through dated interiors and lingering architectural details, while a reconstructed fragment of the artist’s childhood living room – leather sofa, paper television, a paper bottle of homemade plum wine – anchors the images in domestic memory and evokes the artist’s father’s gambling, her mother’s emotional outbursts and the complicated post-war entanglements between Hong Kong, Japan and family histories.
He’s Just a Kid! is a 3D animated short narrated from the perspective of a bear cub whose constipation and painful backside become a vehicle for thinking about childhood vulnerability. Screened from the back of a three metre-long plush crocodile that doubles as seating, the film stitches together cuteness, discomfort and absurdity, mirroring the way families often wrap unspoken pain in jokes and tenderness.
The main film, Whispers in the Belly, is a situational comedy-documentary that follows the Yu family as they reunite in Hong Kong and enter family therapy together. Improvising around a script based on real conversations, they attempt to speak openly about illness, shame and the pressure of caring for one another. The film is presented on over-scale inflatable chairs, grotesque yet inviting, echoing both the softness of plush toys and the discomfort of rectal conditions. Around the films, a series of stuffed creatures and paper furniture act as carriers of memory: at once ridiculous and deeply loved, they hold what could not previously be said.
The Piles We Carry suggests that family trauma rarely disappears; instead, it recirculates through bodies, objects and architecture. By combining slapstick, cuteness and sincerity, Bobby looks for another kind of remedy: a collective digestion in which things long carried alone might, finally, be held together.
Free admission.
