Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject
of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly
unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze
zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea,
thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple
from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically
and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third
century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second
Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the
mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.
Land of the Morning Calm, Land of the Rising Sun: The East Asia Travel Writings of Isabella Bird and George
Curzon
