Exhibition Statement by Curator Bo Young An
Culture is not inherited intact. It arrives through observation and repetition, lived practices, fragments, and gestures learned without full explanation. Its values are embedded in process rather than instruction. For artists shaped by migration and cultural translation, inheritance is inseparable from change.
What Follows brings together artists who approach cultural preservation as continuation: the practice of creating as something lived forward. The works in this exhibition consider how culture moves across generations, how it is reshaped by migration while adapting to new contexts and ways of living. Inheriting culture, here, is about learning what should be held onto, what can shift, and what is reimagined.
Through cultural translation and speculative storytelling, these artists revisit interrupted histories not as fixed inheritances, but as living material, reshaped in the present and carried into the future through making.
Speculation becomes necessary where archives are incomplete or inaccessible, particularly within immigrant and diasporic contexts where displacement interrupts continuity. Through this process, memory is understood not only as inheritance, but as something continually negotiated while moving between languages and cultures.
The exhibition positions art as an alternative form of historiography, one that resists dominant and linear cultural narratives and reimagines how history can be structured and told. In doing so, it asks how remembering shifts when home is plural and when identity is shaped across borders. Storytelling becomes self-definition, a means of integration and survival.
Art emerges as a site of cultural transmission: a transformation enacted through making. What Follows considers how artists become vessels of cultural continuation, one shaped as much by adaptation as by inheritance.
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