The Museum - 3X3 Merit Awarded Series
This series of works challenge the museum as an institution that is bound to the western history of expansionism and colonialism. The first pre-modern form of the museum was the "cabinet of curiosities" in the Renaissance era, the age in which Europe began expansionary exploration and bought back "treasures" from its colonies, including artifacts, animal specimens, and even human remains. A lot of universal survey museum nowadays still employs a triumphal display style of arrangement, exhibiting objects that European countries pillaged from conquered colonies or enemies. This series of works aims to emerge an institutional critique of the museum as a colonial space and a site of violence that dehumanizes people from the colony and advocates a symbolic power of the "greatness" of European civilization.