_{Noel Cheung 張知行}

⸰ curator ⸰
⸰ researcher ⸰
⸰ maker ⸰

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Photos by Annie Lye

Can We Excavate Who We Are?
2024

A pair of vessels made with black stoneware clay, left unglazed. Their textured surface is achieved by repeatedly piercing the clay with steel wire.
—Can We Excavate Who We Are? was created in response to a poem my aunt wrote about the precious friendship we have forged together.

Black Sheep

What is it to be different?
You shout, sneak out, stay silent
or simply shut away from shunning sight.
No one says it’s easy to be the odd one out,
sticking out like a sore thumb.

Why do people rarely admit they want
to be different too?
They sneer, shoot scornful glares and sling
hurting words like stones as if the ultimate
goal of living is all about being dead-boring.

If there were a choice to be born
a black sheep or a white sheep,
my choice would cry out loud
like black ink on a white sheet,
never mistaken or compromised.

I am glad an ally was born to
carry on the brightness of blackness
in the family that hails whiteness.
If truth be told, she makes my world merrier
with more than black and white put together.

To my stunning niece, Noel. Love you always.
From her equally stunning aunt, Mary.
—Can We Excavate Who We Are? approaches identity as something layered, buried, and partially inaccessible. The work draws on archaeological metaphors to reflect how personal and collective identities are formed through time, rupture, and remembrance.

Their forms appear as broken, incomplete, or eroded, suggesting that the question of identity is something fragmented and a constant work in progress. Rather than presenting a resolved narrative, the pair of vessels resists clarity, inviting viewers to sit with ambuiguity and absence.