Hello, this is Momo!

Hello, I am Leung Mee-ping; people call me Momo. I am an artist based in Hong Kong. I will be coming to Nashville in late August for an installation at the Parthenon Museum. This will be my first visit to Nashville. One of my students in HK, who is from Nashville, told me “You’ll love the city.” And I believe him.

When I saw the call for entries for this exhibition, I admired the curatorial concept which intends to explore health issues through an enlightening series of participatory works. In the contemporary art scene, this theme is rare, at least in HK.

I am interested in creating work related to daily life by collecting various objects or images with memories. Examples include used tea bags, mail boxes, air sickness bags, human hair, objects from the neighborhood, etc. Most of my works are community-based in various mediums. Usually, it takes me quite a long time to complete a work as I do extensive background research and collecting. You can find other examples of my work at www.lmp.hk. 

Elsewhere. 1991-2014. Mixed-media. 20,000 Chinese tea bags sewn together by hand.

Memorize the Future as shown at Hair Dialogue, Hong Kong Museum of Arts, 2006.

Daily. 2009. 2,000 glass bricks filled with objects collected from local residents. Prince Boulevard, Chiayi, Taiwan.

Expected Departure. 2007-2012. Installation of light boxes of X-rayed travel sickness bags.

The project I am creating for the Parthenon Museum, Chronicle, is an installation work and I need assistance from the Nashville community to collect a few hundred shortcut, life guide books, such as:

 

 

All the guidebooks collected will be displayed on a shelf in the exhibition gallery, two local senior citizens will sit on either end of shelf; visitors will be able to chat with them about their lives and experiences while looking through the shortcut guidebooks. This work aims to explore the dialectics between speed and desire.

I would like locals to donate guidebooks to me via the Parthenon Museum. Please contact curator Susan Shockley susan.shockly@nashville.gov or Parthenon summer intern Blake Schreiner baschr04@louisville.edu with your book donations.

If any local senior citizens are interested in participating in the project (sitting in the Parthenon gallery and sharing their stories and experiences with visitors) please contact me: meepingleun@yahoo.com.hk.

As I work on this project all the way from HK I will be posting the latest news here on the FLEX IT! blog. Thanks for reading. Momo.