Between Lands: Migration as Transformation
About the Artworks
Tap on the Artwork Label to read more about each work.
Video still from SOUVENIRS (2020-2024)
SOUVENIRS (2020–2024) is a meditation on memory, loss, and resilience across time and place. During the 2020 pandemic, Aung Ko, accompanied by his daughter, returned to his parents’ village in Thuye’dan, Myanmar. Surrounded by the familiar sights of his childhood, he began filming traditional bamboo raft-making practices — a daily activity he had grown up with, but now witnessed anew through the eyes of his daughter. The craft, once vital to the community, was beginning to fade, due to the compounded effects of environmental degradation, rising costs of materials, and the scarcity of skilled labour.
Aung Ko was hence compelled to document this tenuous practice — not merely for posterity, but for his daughter, the villagers, and, most of all, for himself — as a way of preserving intangible heritage, and the memories of his home. This work stands as a tribute to the artist’s daughter, Dahlia, the villagers of Thuye’dan, and to the fading fragments of a former life. Through his work, he explores how memory survives across distance, and how art becomes a vessel for remembrance, continuity, and transformation.
Originally created and presented at Palais de Tokyo, this video work stands as a deeply personal archive, born from rupture and carried forward by resilience.
Installation view (detail) of le rideau de la mémoire
le rideau de la mémoire explores the lives of Vietnamese farmers who were forcibly recruited in the years 1939–1940 to work as indentured labourers in France. From munition factories, textile plants, to shipyards, these labourers toiled under brutal conditions to support France’s war efforts against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Following the war’s end, many were then sent to the South of France to cultivate rice to alleviate food shortages. In the process, thousands died from exhaustion under the harsh weather and miserable working conditions.
Although these Vietnamese labourers had never once worn a soldier's uniform — only receiving a set of blue workers’ clothes — they were known as “soldiers” or “ soldier labourers”. Upon their eventual return to Viet Nam, these labels inadvertently marked them as collaborators of the country’s colonial enemy. Shunned and distrusted, some joined the Viet Minh to reclaim their honour, while others destroyed their papers and withdrew into anonymity, living out their days in poverty, illness, and silence.
The rideau (curtain) at the heart of the work serves as a double metaphor. Like a heavy quilt, it envelopes the smothered and forgotten dreams of people who had lost over a decade of their youth in a foreign land. At the same time, it alludes to the veil of memory itself, recalling a generation uprooted and deprived of dignity in the very same country that once claimed to champion liberty and revolution.
Starter Home
Starter Home addresses the plight of migrant workers from Myanmar—the largest migrant community in Thailand. These workers are often driven away from their homelands by political instability, labour shortages and the promise of better wages in a foreign land. While most are registered and work legally in Thailand, many enter the country illegally. Thus, with very little autonomy and their livelihoods at stake, these workers are incredibly vulnerable to exploitation and deportation. Even those working legally often face discrimination, struggling to access social protection and labour rights.
The installation is constructed from blankets commonly found in markets catered to the Myanmar community. Fishing nets and plastic cords are overlaid on these textiles, materials typically associated with the occupations of the migrant community in sectors such as agriculture, construction, and manufacturing. The three 'flags' in the centre of the piece — designed by three Myanmar migrant workers, using their own clothing — allude to their homeland. The elements of the work come together to form a portrait of the resilient Myanmar migrant — though displaced, they continue to display strength amidst adversity, hoping for a better future.
Study with landscape (1 of 5 photo prints)
Study with landscape is a site-specific photographic series conceptualised in the course of Jason Lim’s residency at the Fondation la Roche Jacquelin.
Shot on-site in the woods surrounding the residence, the piece documents Lim’s dialogue with the natural environment of the French countryside. As a performance, it operates as an embodied sketch — a study of the artist as he responds in gesture to the French landscape. The land’s light and air coalesce into a setting that feels both familiar and foreign, paralleling the migrant’s journey, and the never-ending pursuit for familiarity in a land unknown.
Wearing a sewn moss helmet to efface his human identity, the artist decentres human subjectivity in the work, levelling with the forest and its flora. Lim’s work poignantly explores man’s intrinsic relationship with nature and the fraught desire to assimilate with it. Even when filtered through different lights, nature remains a quiet, comforting companion, travelling alongside journeys and offering subtle echoes of home in distant landscapes.
Photography and Performance by Jason Lim. Documentation by Adrien Morisot.
The Classification of Bodies (detail of notice board)
Work-in-progress for Phantasma Concha (HOME 5) during Sub+ Residencies 2024, France
The title of this work combines words from two different languages. Greek for ‘ghost’ or ‘apparition’, Phantasma is evocative of something ethereal, invisible, or haunting — an item that exists but cannot be fully seen or touched. The Spanish word Concha is defined as ‘shell’, which in many cultures, is symbolic of protection, transformation, journeys, and represents the idea of home or shelter for varied organisms.
The definition of Phantasma reminds Nge Lay of the mosquito net — a common household item that can be found in many tropical Southeast Asian homes. The mosquito net’s associated notion of keeping pests away and providing safety in the form of comfort to its user inspired the tent-like structure of this work. Concha, therefore, supplements the work’s metaphor of constructing an impermanent home — one that affords protection and safety, whilst simultaneously rendering these attributes fleeting and transient.
Together, Phantasma Concha can be interpreted as ‘Ghost Shell’ or ‘Apparition Shell’, symbolising an invisible or intangible protective space, filled with the collective memories, experiences, and emotions of migrants. It conveys the idea of an unseen but deeply felt shelter, fragile and full of hopes, fears, and challenges — reimagined and recreated in the exhibition space as a communal gathering ground of comfort. Nge Lay's work echoes the migrant's dilemma of having to contend with the idea of a new and impermanent space to call home — an act typically following the displacement of a migrant from their home land.
Video still from Fragments of Lotus
Fragments of Lotus is a video work exploring the evolving identity of Yadanar as an artist, shaped by complex histories of censorship, migration, and cultural transition. Raised in the traditional environment of Myanmar, Yadanar developed an acute awareness of the power of expression and the cost of silence. Living in a new cultural context, her experience of displacement becomes a source of reflection and artistic inquiry. Through layered visuals and personal symbolism, she reclaims her narrative — fragmented, but as a form of resilience and reinvention.
The other faces of Frans (1 of 5 photo prints)
The other faces of Frans is a photographic series that reimagines an 18th-century European statue – typically a symbol of cultural pride and permanence – through the lens of a migrant artist. Having lived in France for the past four years, Yadanar navigates the shifting forces between constructing a new home, and the opposite pull towards her homeland. In this work, a headless classical statue of Frans – an imagined name – is adorned with masks, garments, and objects that recall the spirit of Myanmar’s own traditions and Asia’s layered histories. These transformations dissolve fixed historical identities and introduce alternative, gender-fluid, and cross-cultural presences — figures with the quiet strength of guardians and the grace of ceremonial beings.
By merging Myanmar and broader Asian cultural forms with Western classical sculpture, the photographic series disrupts ideas of a static heritage and hierarchy. It becomes both a personal reflection of life in a foreign country and a meditation on identity as an evolving state — never entirely in one place, yet deeply rooted in many.
About the Artists
Learn more about each artist > HERE.