The Deer Garden

My mother lives in a rural area of Kansas, threatened in recent years by encroaching suburbanization. Since 2024, my spouse and I have taken turns visiting my mother to help her with house repairs and to assert our presence to overly inquisitive realtors and developers eager to displace older residents.

The centrepiece of this exhibition is a TV tray table in my mother’s home, where we share our meals. In this modest and intimate setting, my mother steps into one of her most profound roles as our family’s knowledge keeper. Her stories—simultaneously historical, allegorical, almost mythic, and sometimes prophetic—come alive.

In one story, my mother explains how she sees herself, brave and capable of doing things alone. When she was a child in Taiwan, her family rented her a third-story bedroom separate from their first floor flat. Every night, she had to ascend the staircase outside into the mountains under the watchful eyes of mountain lions.

In another story, my mother shares that the character for Yuàn 苑 in her name means “garden of the immortals,” or “the deer garden where the emperor’s sons practice their hunting.” As I admire the poetry of her name, my mother laughs at the irony of her family naming her after imperials and celestial beings who would have never troubled themselves over the problems of working class mortals. Her family by then had suffered repeated losses of language and home under multiple occupying governments, including the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. Years later after our family immigrated, my grandparents would lose their house again when the US government eminent domained their neighbourhood for a freeway project.

The Deer Garden woodblock features a Formosan Sika Deer and Clouded Leopard in a continuous, cyclical chase. The woodcut is designed to resemble a piece of hand-carved jade, with the final block inlaid into the surface of a TV tray table.

The works in this exhibition capture moments when my mother’s stories are suspended between a child’s imagination and an elder’s recollection, one in which there might truly have been lions in Taiwan’s mountains, or perhaps an elusive Clouded Leopard before habitat loss caused them to die out and disappear.

The mountain lions of my mother’s childhood ended up being feral cats. The white-tailed deer my mother watches from her window are in the heart of the rural Americana Midwest. Yet for a moment, as she passes her stories to my stewardship and safekeeping, the common becomes mythic.

The works in this exhibition are part of my ongoing series called The Negotiation Table, in which I take hand-carved woodblocks and transform them into sites of negotiation. This transformation responds to the history of how print became indoctrinated in the fine arts, in contrast to its use in community activation and protest. To compete with high art forms, it became best practice to destroy printing plates to make prints artificially rare. I have always been uncomfortable with destroying evidence of labour in favour of rarifying the asset. I reflect on the tension of assimilation and resistance within printmaking, as a person of Taiwanese and Chinese descent who has been made artificially rare via ongoing exclusionary policies in white dominant spaces. I reclaim printmaking as a tool of abundance and presence.

Via this work, I interweave the personal and political, to strengthen local-global perspectives of the impacts of colonization. I share my family’s stories as a frame through which we can better understand one another as different peoples connected through shared struggles—and shared imaginings for something beyond what our stories seem to be.