Sim Chi Yin's 'Longings, Returns' at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York

Key facts

• Sim Chi Yin's 归舟: Longings, Returns runs 8–29 August at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York
• The exhibition features works from the photomontage series The Suitcase is a Little Bit Rotten (2022/23–ongoing), all dated 2026
• Works are UV prints on glass, backlit on vintage-looking wooden stands
• The collages place cutout photographs of Sim's grandfather Shen Huansheng onto enlargements of magic-lantern slides of British-colonised Malaya
• Shen Huansheng was a leftist newspaper editor and educator expelled from Malaya with 20,000–35,000 others, mostly ethnic Chinese communists and opponents of the colonial state
• In May 1949 Shen was deported to his ancestral village in Shantou, China, joined a communist guerrilla group and was executed by the Chinese Nationalist Party
• The mass displacement occurred during the Cold War and the 12-year Anti-British National Liberation War beginning in 1948, called the 'Malayan Emergency' by the British
• A mural of sepia-toned vinyl prints hidden under blue paper was revealed through slits cut during a performance on the opening night