Spirit House
Cantor Arts Center
Stanford University
Sep 4–Jan 26, 2025

How do we contend with loss that transcends the individual—in other words, loss that becomes collective, loss untethered from linear time or geographical boundaries? This complex set of questions emerged throughout “Spirit House,” a group show curated by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander. Specifically, the exhibition examined how the loss of one’s home—whether the “homeland” or more personal, domestic spaces—occurs amid the flux of borders, of territory, and of people, people whose official histories and cultural memories are forever being contested, even erased.

These anxieties are present in Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai’s installation Shore of Security (2022), which appropriates and reassembles parts from discarded Thai spirit houses—small devotional structures that provide shelter for supernatural entities—as well as a charred dollhouse designed by the artist’s mother. In its current iteration it resembles a haunted house, with ridged lines extending into jagged forms; inside, the skeleton of a snake is lit by a red, glowing LED. Shore of Security no longer functions as a sacred space of protection or sanctuary; instead, it can be seen as representing the haunted ruins left behind after spirituality has disappeared from public life. This theme is further expanded in Arunanondchai’s video work Songs for Dying (2021), which follows a sea turtle as it recalls its past lives. The film jumps back and forth between images of the pro-democracy protests that rocked Thailand in 2020–21, instances of state violence in South Korea, footage of various landscapes, and, importantly in the context of this exhibition, animistic practices. The overarching message seems to point toward ruptures that have emerged surrounding the grief over the loss of the spiritual amid the secular discourses that prioritize truth and reconciliation.

Looking through a more domestic lens, Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s installation Doorknobs: Horsham, London, New York, Providence, Seoul, Venice Homes (2021) visualizes emotional resonances associated with constant relocation. Doorknobs from the artist’s previous homes and studios have been decontextualized, no longer serving their original function. In this work they are reproduced with fabric, thereby obscuring the sense of the doorknobs’ materiality—a reminder that specific memory can quickly collapse into hazy nostalgia. Similarly, Filipino American artist James Clar’s Nobody’s Home (Manila) (2020) turns a wooden door—made by a carpenter in the Philippine coastal city of Taguig and replete with local design motifs—into a failed promise of home for diasporic artists. It is an attempt by Clar to come to terms with the conflict between estrangement from and attachment to one’s ancestral home. A white light glows under the door, hinting at a home that remains just out of reach, an illusory home, an idea more than a reality: not surprisingly, the door is locked. Meanwhile, impressions of footsteps on the ground in front hint at the struggle the country’s citizens undertake as they try to forge a brighter future while trying to resolve the difficult past.

This powerful sense of contested history is further embodied in Japanese American artist Kelly Akashi’s Life Forms (Poston Pines) (2021), which perhaps draws on the Kantian idea of the hand as “the window to the mind.” Akashi, who struggled to find out the truth of her grandparents’ fate at the Japanese American internment camp in Poston, Arizona, traveled to the former site where, in the absence of physical evidence, she found pine trees planted by the detainees. What emerged from this was a bronze cast of her disembodied hand, severed from the body, holding a pine cone. By doing so, Akashi is asking how future (re)production of memory surrounding the history of persecution can survive. Akashi is pointing to what we might call the geography of remembrance, or the idea that generative memorialization can still take place despite incomplete access to the historical record. Separately, in Inheritance (2022), heirlooms belonging to Akashi’s grandmother and a stone from Poston function as the artist’s way of suggesting that history has been, and perhaps always will be, an eternal struggle between memory and forgetting.

Elsewhere, a quieter and more private expression of domesticity—this time romantic as opposed to filial—was present in Thai artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s The Vapor of Melancholy (2014). It is a photograph of the artist’s former partner, Teem, smoking in their bedroom, taken while they were still together. Here there is a sense of anticipation, or foreboding, that can be felt in Weerasethakul’s intimate record of a loved one: smoke and fireworks—traditional symbols of ephemerality—cover Teem’s body, as if Weerasethakul was able to foresee the relationship’s dissolution.

By excavating the process of mourning and remembrance for the Asian diaspora—many of whom left their ancestral homes to seek better economic opportunities, or who were displaced by the centuries-long European colonial project—“Spirit House” highlighted how contemporary history can be viewed as a set of contradictions that unsettle entrenched notions of spiritual security and connectivity, which in turn can lead to the return of repressed forces. When the ghosts of the past speak, we must listen.

Qingyuan Deng is a writer and curator living between New York and Shanghai.

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