I notice a sound that’s out of place: silence on a busy street; rumbling thunder in January; birds chirping in the dead of night.

Over the past two years, eight artists based in Canada—Priscilla Yin Barker, Hayley Chiu, Tong Zhou Lafrance, Katia Lo Innes, Serene Mitchell, Emerald Repard-Denniston, Tizzi Tan, and Jasmine Yu—all happened to travel back to Asia. While some artists visited mainland China, others visited Hong Kong and Taiwan. Each territory is fraught with complex histories of migration and imperialism, and thus is called ‘home’ by billions in overlapping diasporas.

Homecoming is both a collective and singular act. It involves a departure, a twelve-hour flight, a pendulum swinging back and forth across the Pacific Ocean.

An uncanny rift opens between memory and home. While investigating this dwelling, we find a dirty mirror, a ghost lingering in a family album; a decaying facade, an ink stain oozing across memory. A woman’s face stares back at us, cool and detached, full of rage and longing. The mirror falls. And then, a shatter.

This multimedia exhibition challenges and reinterprets the concept of a “homecoming.” Artists grapple with contradictory emotions and fluid representations of Asianness and Asia as a material space. Physical and metaphorical boundaries are called into question in each artist’s journey toward reconciliation. By incorporating archival materials, photo weavings, still-life, dioramas, architectural molds, and experimental film, this exhibit seeks to understand these rituals of return.

a feeling

is effervescent. An embodied reaction born in our brains and spread to the tips of our limbs. It is joy and sorrow and love and despair.

of a feeling

that is intangible. Unable to be articulated by words but pass along by generations of gestures. It is inherited and lives alongside us; sometimes as intimately as a strand of hair and sometimes as distant as a forgotten photo album on a shelf.

Through the site-specific installation works of mihyun maria kim, Jackson Klie, and Gillian Toliver, a feeling of a feeling seeks to examine how we coalesce with untranslatable affects that are bestowed upon us by way of identity. Themes of translucency, translation and fragmentation are brought forward by the artists as they employ gestural responses to the inefficacy of language as a way of communicating with themselves. In this, the exhibition space extends to a place of conversation to delve into a feeling of a feeling.