Lure of the local(e)
Lure of the Local(e) investigates the complexity of belonging. Through the use of portraiture, object, and photographic sculpture, Ng considers the role of the settler, the citizen, and the human. Reflecting on experiences from his home in Hawaiʻi to the continental United States, the artist explores how land and place specificity affect individual and collective positionality.
The exhibition's title samples Lucy Lippard's book "The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society." The text focuses on how the body connects to place by examining its relationship to history, geography, and culture. Ng's remix of the show's title includes the inclusion of an "e" at the end of local to call attention to the body and place specificity. Furthermore, it refers to "local culture," a particular political and cultural identity marker in Hawaiʻi. This paronomasia acknowledges subversive notions of land passivity while activating critical discourse surrounding race, power, and settler colonialism.
Lucy Lippard describes place as having a particular pull, one that "operates in each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation." Ng's work is a critical self-examination of the spaces where history and the body overlap. In doing so, the question he asks himself and his audience to consider is not if I belong, rather how I belong.