Square Street Gallery is pleased to present "Another Odyssey,” a group show with Celia Ko, Ziyi Wang and Wong Winsome Dumalagan.

Drifting across restless seas while yearning for home, they finally arrive only to discover a jarring dissonance: they have become strangers in their own home. The homeland they remember exists only in memory; the person who left its shores exists only in the past, unmarked by traces of that journey. In this era of fluidity, we all embark on personal odysseys, perpetually negotiating our identities, carrying fragments of our origins while being irrevocably altered by our journeys. ‘Another Odyssey’ brings together three artists who chart these migratory passages and their profound impact on selfhood. They invite us to linger in these transitory spaces and contemplate how migration not only changes our relationship to place but also reshapes who we are.

Ziyi Wang plunges us into the disorienting experience of transmigration. In ‘Finding Pigeons’ (2023), Wang roams London's streets with the unusual mission of conversing with urban pigeons in Beijing dialect. What emerges is a poignant meditation on cultural displacement. The humble pigeon, revered in Beijing's centuries-old traditions of pigeon whistles and seen as a symbol of intelligence and auspiciousness, transforms into ‘flying rats’ and urban pests upon crossing geographical boundaries. Wang's work reveals how the same being can be valued or devalued merely by changing location. The pigeon thus becomes a powerful metaphor for the transmigrant experience, where one's intrinsic nature remains unchanged while external perceptions shift dramatically. Through these interspecies ‘interviews,’ Wang prompts us to question how we assign worth based on cultural context rather than inherent qualities.

Wang’s video ‘Land Sailing’ (2024) explores the complexities of cultural navigation as shaped by state authority, highlighting the tension between imposed national identities and personal cultural affiliations. Drawing from her experiences as a Chinese immigrant in the UK, the series captures her attempts to return from Paris after losing her Biometric Resident Permit, the only legal document that permits her re-entry to the UK. Wang documents her arduous journey after being denied boarding, illustrating her crossing of the English Channel. The video opens with the state's rejection of her belonging, as her lost documents transform her into a ‘nobody’ within the legal framework. Her route from Calais to Dover echoes one of the main passages for refugees, whose cultural identities are similarly obscured until recognized by the state. Wang’s journey parallels Odysseus’ voyage to Ithaca, where border control serves as the ultimate barrier to homecoming. This narrative reflects her complex emotions regarding her Chinese heritage and her sense of belonging in the UK, a place she identifies as home despite being labelled a temporary immigrant. The narration shifts between English and Putonghua, further emphasizing the duality of her cultural experience.

Celia Ko's ‘Bubble Wrap’ series transforms family photographs into portals that both reveal and conceal the past. These meticulous still-life paintings capture family photos salvaged from a relative's archive, each image a fragment of Ko's ancestral history, showing relatives long departed. The photographs aren't merely relics but vessels of narrative, stories reconstructed through her mother's recollections and the artist's own imagination. The bubble wrap surrounding each image serves as a powerful metaphor for memory's preservation and isolation—a protective layer that simultaneously distances us from what it guards. Like memories carefully stored in albums, then boxes, then attics, these wrapped images exist in a liminal space between presence and absence, part of our heritage yet removed from daily life. For Ko, these family narratives form crucial roots that have anchored her sense of self throughout her migration experiences. Yet they transcend personal significance, embodying a collective memory for Hongkongers of her generation: echoes of traditional ways of life and values that persist despite geographical and temporal distance. Here, we glimpse how family memory becomes a tether to the places we call home.

Wong Winsome Dumalagan's ‘Trajectory Portraits: Egret’ series captures the ephemeral poetry of movement across boundaries. In ‘Trajectory Portraits: Egret 01,’ Wong follows an egret's flight as it traverses from natural to urban space. The video employs slow-motion and superimposition techniques to compress time, rendering every nuance of the bird's passage through space. This meticulous documentation reveals the grace and complexity of movement that might otherwise go unnoticed in our perception of linear time. ‘Trajectory Portraits: Egret 02’ extends this meditation through material transformation. Film stills from the video are developed in the darkroom and framed with acrylic engravings of additional stills, creating a fragmented portrait of motion. Through these material interventions, Wong transforms the original journey into something simultaneously more tangible and more elusive. The resulting work embodies the paradox of migration itself, where movement through space fundamentally alters both the traveller and the record of that travel.

Wong's installation ‘Cave, the Hum, Gecko Eggs’ delves into the archaeology of abandonment and the ghostly residue of former inhabitants. The work originated from Wong's discovery of gecko eggs nestled within an abandoned speaker, a chance encounter with the traces of life persisting in forgotten spaces. Transforming this hollow into a site of contemplation, Wong installs a light source and camera within the speaker's cavity, creating an observatory for the absences that define the space. This meticulous documentation of emptiness becomes a meditation on temporal liminality and the impossible task of capturing transitional moments that exist between presence and absence. The speaker, once channeling human voices, housed reptilian life, and then artistic intervention, involves a set of sequential occupations that never quite overlap. Wong's work thus becomes an elegy for the unwitnessed moment, the threshold crossing that leaves only fragmentary evidence of its occurrence. Wong's installation invites us to consider the way spaces that retain the spectral imprint of their former inhabitants, and how the attempt to document such transitions invariably transforms what we seek to preserve.