Installation view of Michele Chu's solo exhibition "you, trickling" at PHD Group, Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
MICHELE CHU: YOU, TRICKLING
Installation view of Michele Chu's solo exhibition "you, trickling" at PHD Group, Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
How does one confront loss—personal and collective? In her past works, Michele Chu has engaged in relational art within the context of acute social disruption, building installations and participatory performances that rewrite public gestures. For her debut solo exhibition, “you, trickling,” the artist further mines rituals of intimacy and vulnerability, inviting viewers to participate in a meditative journey that renders the autobiographical as shared experience, and memory as material.
Throughout the exhibition space, the loss of a body—or bodies—reveals a spectral map that oscillates between the ghostly interpersonal relationships of the artist and her ailing mother, foregrounded by water leaking, reforming, condensing, and fracturing.
Installation view of Michele Chu's solo exhibition "you, trickling" at PHD Group, Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
At the entrance, the visitor is met with a wall of fabric separating two spaces: the exterior world, ruled by social order and automaticity, and the fragmented interior, where trauma, memory, and the self resides.
Walking further into the exhibition, one encounters a series of rituals faintly reminiscent of a bathhouse experience that cleanses, soothes, and unsettles.
Installation view of Michele Chu's solo exhibition "you, trickling" at PHD Group, Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
Installation view of Michele Chu's solo exhibition "you, trickling" at PHD Group, Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
From there, a collection of body parts emerges: a belly button, cast in bronze; a softened hand reaching out; sharp perforations on skin; a woman’s back toward us, lying still and silent.
Michele Chu
twisting, turning belly buttons
2022
Cast bronze, handmade copper jump rings, lace, ribbon, safety pins, freshwater pearls, salt
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
Installation view of Michele Chu's solo exhibition "you, trickling" at PHD Group, Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
Demarcated by tunnels and fabric passageways, the space encloses the visitor in its umbilical recollections of birth, menstruation, excretion, and death.
Detail of into tears, into salt I (2023) in "you, trickling" at PHD Group, Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
Michele Chu
seeping
2023
Copper pipes, massage bed, buckets, water, instructions
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
Michele Chu
glimmer in your eye
2023
Emulsion lift on window glass, stained glass, freshwater pearls, artist’s menstrual blood/hair/ fingernails/toenails/cigarette butts in resin, chain, solder, hair
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
In The Body Keeps Its Score, a book about suffering and survival, Bessel van der Kolk suggests that to perform is to conduct agency; that “acting is an experience of using your body to take your place in life.” Addressing an unknown second person, “you, trickling” is both a poignant observation—of the lost and fading maternal figure—and a guide to how we might flow back, however slowly, into ourselves.
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