A dual exhibition ‘Longer, Linger, Angler’, 2025 Xiuching Tsay x Pande Wardina
at Ara Contemporary (Jakarta) in collaboration with Nonfrasa Gallery (Bali, Indonesia).
I bring together paintings and small sculptures as a single assemblage of memory, ritual, and re-articulated half-fiction. The work begins in the bedroom; the space where a child can fully be themself and follows the quiet disorientation some children can experience when stepping out their bedroom. This transition is mirrored through my use of materials gathered along the way, from my childhood bedroom to the staircase and the buddha altar space . Here, personal diary writing becomes another form of mapping: a way to record inner shifts, and the private logic of childhood.
Using origami, candle-flame writing, empty boxes found beneath the staircase, and objects/ notes found in my teenage bedroom’s drawers, I treat the domestic interior as a space where personal recollection and cultural ritual overlap. These materials form a Haptic Archive, a memory system built through touch, opacity, and vulnerability rather than fixed narratives. Wax trails echo an idea of Hallucinatory Fluidity, where meaning slips between clarity and uncertainty.
Themes of wishing and happiness surface not through a child’s desire, but through an adult’s attempt to grasp ‘happiness’ in their memories. From here, I was interested in Hansel and Gretel tale, re-imagine some scenes that hold both home longing and the quiet terror of uncertainty. Trails, charms, diary-like marks, and ritual gestures become markers of hope, doubt, and unrealised futures.
An extension’s history, 2025
An extension’s history, 2025
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Playground Slide o Yesterday o Brickhole o Rainy day o Rainbow o ~ , 2025
The Spelling Which Not Sold in a Birthday Deco Section, 2025
