Research-driven
The “reading experience” was described as a constant concern throughout Cheng’s curatorial process. “How might library collections, academic research, and literary works be presented authentically, while allowing the depth of the texts to be conveyed through artistic means?” This was the question was continually considered during the curation of the exhibition.
Within this framework, the exhibition was designed to create a space in which visitors could be immersed in stories and follow the journeys of women immigrants.
The origins of this exhibition were rooted in the research of Dr. Vivienne Poy, whose study on Chinese immigrant women was later compiled into Passage to Promised land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada. In this book, 28 interviews with women were edited into a collective narrative, through which the experiences of female immigrants between the 1950s and 1990s could be encountered by readers.
It has been noted that Cheng re-presented these histories by printing the original interview transcripts on drafting paper as part of her installation Read Between the Lines. Through this arrangement, visitors were invited to approach the struggles faced by women of that era by engaging directly with the precious words once spoken in oral testimony.
Read Between The Lines
Jessica Cheng, 2025
Free-motion embroidery, drafting paper,
mixed media installation
With the support and contributions of the archivist and librarian from the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, valuable archival materials were carefully displayed along the bookshelves. In this way, the exhibition was shaped not only by Cheng’s curatorial vision but also through the stewardship of those who preserved the records of lived experience.
Over the years, Cheng’s practice has been characterised by a sustained engagement with the deconstruction of texts, the reimagining of their presentation, and the transformation of reading into an embodied encounter. The works on view were intended not merely as vehicles of knowledge-sharing but as invitations into narrative worlds.
It was hoped that visitors would experience the stories not as distant documents, but as voices that could be entered, inhabited, and felt on a personal and unique level.