The Art of Accumulation in an Age of Decluttering
My mother came of age under British colonial rule in Hong Kong, treated as a second-class citizen and unable to return to her parents’ ancestral home in Hunan province. In the US, she roamed antique malls and flea markets in search of relics, specifically those from China that had somehow made their way overseas and were being peddled by dealers who, back in the 1990s, didn’t know their true value. Instead of magazine subscriptions, we received catalogues in the mail from Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which my mother would study in order to teach herself how to differentiate between what was authentic and what was fake. All I knew as a child was that we had a lot of old things. I didn’t understand their significance to my mother until I fully grappled with my own sense of identity. Through collecting, she keeps alive the dream of cultural belonging, the antiques serving as both connection to and substitute for the melancholic fantasy of a motherland.
From the essay I was most proud of publishing this year about hoarding, art, my immigrant mother, and Marie Kondo.
Image: Song Dong, Waste Not: Song Dong, 2006 (installation view), at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
