The work draws directly from my experience as an immigrant from Hong Kong, and from witnessing the rapid erosion of civil liberties in my home city. The circle of typewriters reflects something larger though: a pattern repeating across the world, where the mechanisms of expression are present and active, yet produce only silence.

Scattered across the floor, tear-stained newsprint speaks to the emotional weight of that silence, a reminder that behind every suppressed voice there is a profound human cost.

. . .

Evolution of the Series

Mute began in 2022 as part of my solo exhibition Longing For Home—a single typewriter on a desk, paired with an unplugged vintage telephone and surveilled by a red laser light. Later that year the work travelled to Bloc Projects in Sheffield for Longing For Home II, where the typewriter was reimagined on a folding wooden chair bound with red string.
In 2023, the project expanded into Mute_7 for The Aesthetics of Silence at Hazelhurst Art Centre, growing to seven typewriters.

There is something that shifts when one voice becomes seven: the personal opens into something collective, a shared condition rather than a solitary one. Mute_7.2 carries that further, adding seven folding chairs, seats that are present but unoccupied.

. . .

Mute is a continuing series.
One day I hope to fill an entire space with 30, perhaps 100 typewriters, and hear what it sounds like when all that effort and noise still changes nothing on the page.