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Walk with the Weight of a Second Beating Heart

Chan Cho Kiu Bunchi
Law Yuk Mui
Boat Zhang

2025.2.8[sat] - 2025.2.23[sun]
12:00-19:00 (Mon, Tue)
12:00-16:00, 18:00‒21:00(Wed, Thur, Fri)
12:00‒21:00(Sat, Sun)
admission free

Curated by Qu Chang

One heartbeat, two heartbeats; walking by one, walking as two.

“Only a mother can walk with the weight of a second beating heart,” writes the diasporic poet Ocean Vuong. To walk with another heart is not as most idealised narratives on modern motherhood go, a harmonious synchronisation of the rhythms of lives, but often a tumultuous coming-together, even clashing, of different vibrations, breathing, weights, shivering, and pacing. Carrying multiple pulsations, the mother’s body is a transforming site of fulfilment and breakage, addition and deprivation, intimacy and violence, clamorous and tranquillity.

Presenting recent works of three female artists, Chan Cho Kiu Bunchi (Hong Kong), Law Yuk Mui (Hong Kong) and Boat Zhang (Shanghai), Walk with the Weight of a Second Beating Heart is a polyphonic composition blending the artists’ experience of motherhood, migrant-hood, and the changing rhythms of the corporal and the everyday. Raising their children in Japan, the three artists-mothers reposition their mentality and identity to a new cultural context while carrying and caring for a second beating heart. They explore “intimacy” and “nurturing” towards a deeper, more complex stratum where an intense process of inter-shaping occurs continuously.

In the exhibition space, different sounds and tempos converge—walking, running, chopping, smearing, music playing—echoing the destabilising and self-severing experience of mothering and migrating. The maternal body, a swelling, leaking, forgetting, remembering, and shape-shifting vessel, softly occupies the exhibition space, unsettling its spatial tempo and architectural features. If the body and bodily labour of the mother signify home and the process of home-making, Walk with the Weight of a Second Beating Heart opens an intimate space of sensibility in which the corporality of home and mother are heard, touched, caressed, and re-composed.

Event

8 Feb (Sat)
15:00-
curator docent tour
※free admission

16:00-17:30
artist talk
※free admission

18:00
opening party
※1000 yen for light meal +1 drink

16 Feb (Sun)
14:30-
docent tour by Law Yuk-mui
※free admission

15:30-
Tea Gathering

with Kuroda Natsuki+ Oko Goto (Curator, Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito)
※400 yen for 1 drink


23 Feb (Sun)
closing performance
Law Yuk-mui + Chan Cho-kiu feat. Ho Tsz-yeung

※free admission

Chan Cho-kiu, Bunchi

Chan Cho-kiu, Bunchi was born in 1990 in Hong Kong. She currently lives in Tokyo. Chan’s work focuses on paint […]

Law Yuk-mui

Law Yuk-mui is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator; currently lives and works between Japan and Hong K […]

Boat ZHANG

(b. 1983, China), graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently based in Tokyo and Shangha […]

Qu Chang

Dr.Qu Chang is a curator and writer based in Berlin. She is the Curator of Discursive Practices at Haus der Ku […]