归舟: Longings, Returns by Sim Chi Yin

归舟: Longings, Returns by Sim Chi Yin takes its title from gui zhou, or “homeward-bound vessel,” a recurring motif in classical Chinese poetry evoking an unfulfilled wish for return. This figure of longing becomes the lens to unsettle the intersecting geographies of forced migration and removal stemming from mass deportations in British-ruled Malaya. In her ongoing research, Sim complicates the historiography of the anti-colonial war in Malaya through photography, film, oral histories, and archival intervention. Together these materials reveal the mass deportation of over 30,000 people—mostly ethnic Chinese—from Malaya to China between 1948 and 1960 as a suppressed chapter of colonial counterinsurgency, waged under Cold War emergency legislation. This mass banishment survives only in the chain of paperwork the colonial state used to dispose of those it cast as leftists and their sympathizers. 

In this newly-commissioned performance-installation Sim situates us within the boundless, ungovernable, fluid space of the sea, which acts as ground on which the intergenerational complicity with displacement and erasure is both exposed and refused. Sim’s paternal grandfather, an educator and newspaper editor, was sent into exile in China, then in the midst of civil war, where he was  executed shortly after arrival. Left behind in Malaya, his mother, wife, and five children would never speak of him again. A silence festered quietly within the family for six decades, which Sim now works to address. Footage filmed earlier this year around Perak, Malaysia follows the landscapes that anchor this story, threading in Sim’s own family members alongside her quest to reinstate her grandfather’s presence. Across the interior facade wall, a mural, further obfuscated by an overlay of the sea, assembles fragments of archival documents gathered throughout Sim’s research and counter-archiving. This large-scale collage operates as evidence of how the archive itself was an instrument of forgetting through the mistranslations and omissions that accompanied removal. Four lightboxes hold glass slides that intervene on historical images with speculative renderings of Sim’s grandfather and fellow Malayan deportees, inscribing them back into a landscape from which they were  expelled and showing scenes of the journey. At the center of the installation sits an effigy boat, modeled after vessels used in Chinese folk ritual practice, for a symbolic final passage to the next world/life. 

Through this performance and installation, Sim probes and performs multiple forms of return for those banished, seeking different restitutions and inheritances across her intersecting roles as artist, historical researcher, and granddaughter, niece, daughter, and mother. In looking back, she also signals a longer lineage of forced migration practices stretching from colonial to contemporary times—asking what repair might mean for those whose safe passage continues to be denied. A debut performance on the evening of August 8, with an encore on August 13, will activate the installation, using the mural as its centerpiece and further collapsing the distance between archival document, family memory, fire, ash, and the water that carries one  away and home.

On August 15 we will hold a Long Table discussion around issues of migration and deportation in the US, with two performances, in partnership with The Verbatim Salon.

Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance, and book-making. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022–23) and holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London. Recent exhibitions include: 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2024); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); Barbican Centre, London (2023); Camera Austria, Graz (2024); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Datsuijo Tokyo (2024); Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021). In August 2024, she premiered a theatre performance on her project One Day We’ll Understand, on her family history and the anti-colonial war in what was British Malaya. The performance toured to the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts in Melbourne in February 2025. Sim is based in Berlin.

归舟: Longings, Returns is the fourth in a series of exhibitions under the theme of Homelands. Homelands is a long-term research cycle which delves into the political dimensions of memory—examining what is obscured or distorted in the dominant record—through the work of artists and architects who unmake and remake their connection to place.

归舟: Longings, Returns is made possible with support from The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation and the National Arts Council Singapore.

Homelands is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Teiger Foundation, the Brendan & Helen Bechtel Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Ruth Arts Foundation, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and the invaluable generosity of Storefront’s Board of Directors, the Storefront Circle, Storefront members, and individual donors.