The Ancestral Home
Jeff Chiu

Closing Reception: January 21, 2017 7 – 10 pm
Exhibition Run: Thursday January 5 - Sunday January 22, 2017

Presented in conjunction with The Gladstone Hotel's annual design event Come Up to My Room

My late grandfather’s handwritten memoirs appeared to me as a block of inaccessible information. According to the dates, it contains an extensive recollection of his life - from growing up in rural China to his eventual emigration to Boston, Massachusetts. The act of translating the text from one language to another entails many linguistic discrepancies—many images that may be hidden from the western eye (...and perhaps images that may only appear to the western eye).

Does (human) replication inevitably imply variation?


Is it possible to escape a way of thought and enter into a new one?



Perhaps the perfect translation is a fantasy, and we need to recognize the benefits of the hybrid.

It seems that by replicating something from the past, you lose the nuances of the original.



But at the same time, new subtleties appear as a result of the replication.

At what point in the translation do we begin to interpolate?



Perhaps every life is a secret.

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Jeff Chiu is currently pursuing a BFA in photography from the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. He has written that his work often serves as a guide that navigates an ongoing understanding of diaspora, memory, and deterioration.