In OBORO's large exhibition space, Jing Yuan Huang reinvents Transmigrating Inadequacy, a site-specific installation of large-scale images created from assembled photocopies. By reshaping the gallery's material boundaries, the artist invites the viewer to wander deep within the work where a mythological space inspired by the notion of Tibetan transmigration develops. Huang proposes a metaphorical exploration of the transformations exerted by cultural displacements and the failures and challenges they generate.
According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead (the Bardo Thodol), transmigration is a series of after-death ebb and flow stages, a journey whose finality determines the next reincarnation. Wavering between fragility and strength, loss and gain, this passage is much like immigration, a mirror of the path freely chosen by the artist when she put down roots in North America.
Drawing itself, the crux of this body of work, is also offered to the viewer's gaze as the result of a series of transformations – from photogram to photocopy, grid, and ultimately, installation. An aesthetic of interchange and erosion emerges from images that have transited through many media. The fragility and immensity of the final rendering is fascinating, an invitation to slip into this migrating interlude.