Opening Reception:
February 13, 6 - 9 pm

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Song dynasty scholar Mi Fu, after being appointed as a magistrate, was invited to a meeting with other high ranking officials. However, before bowing to the officials, he saw a rock that struck him so deeply that he bowed to the rock as he would to an older brother, as it was admirable for its long-standing existence through the hardship of natural weathering. Mi Fu bowing to a rock has been depicted in paintings, carvings, poems, and stories to represent the reverence that Chinese intellectuals held for nature and used to explain the phenomenon of “scholar rocks”. These visually interesting rocks were collected as art objects to prompt reflection on how life shapes us at a microcosmic level through constant change.

Utilizing rice flour, recycled paper, binder, ceramic, glaze, paint, and rope, these rocks, hand formed by Robyn, are not natural. Nevertheless, they are rocks reflecting the ways in which identity can be fabricated by social constructs that serve political and economic ends. The rocks are monolithic and under further scrutiny– imprinted and marked by stories, poems, and words that exist to perform, to explain, and to render legibility. The rocks are arranged in a way that opposes nature because, to exist under the gaze of perception and the weight of expectations, requires performance.

These rocks are rocks simply because they are. The bare environment is artificial. Contrast this to the common use of rocks in the Chinese art of penjing, where they are integrated into a small pot together with miniature trees to match the natural environments of mountains that depict landscapes. This spiral of rocks would never be naturally occurring in nature. In fact, the arrangement of rocks in a non-natural way is an archeological way ancient civilizations have marked their existence. Megaliths for ritual, astronomy, or commemoration worldwide exist to ground the metaphysical. In this case, for understanding the inner strife of mixed race and mixed cultural identity that feels almost artificial and unnatural, contrast to the aims of penjing.

Homi Bhaba’s third space speaks to multicultural and multiracial existences that challenge fixed notions of culture and nationhood. However, the third space does not align with hegemonic categorizations. Those with mixed-race or multicultural identities often experience exclusion early on. To be included in a group, they must align themselves with a single identity. The deconstruction of identity evokes loss, grief, longing for inclusion based on wholeness. There is a yearning for belonging while also refusing to be read into singular cultural and racial designations that reinforce prejudices, norms, and borders. Rocks at one point were a part of a larger whole. Though broken off, they are still classified as the whole they were once a part of. In-spite of the distance and transformations, these changes speak to the different environments that the rocks have experienced. The construction and ambiguity of the origins of these rocks and traces of tangible cultural identity speak to the incompatibility with social expectations and the ways in which deconstruction of identity evokes loss, grief, longing for inclusion based on wholeness. The absence in this exhibition captures this empty feeling, the desire to be, as a whole, accepted, without having to change or bend to fit manufactured or reductive labels.

This exhibition seeks to render physical authenticity to the artist’s experience of biracial identity, perception, judgement, and expectation. The lucky knot, the Chinese text, the reflective surfaces all push the viewer to reflect on their role in identifying and forming identity. With a few traces of digestible culture, it challenges us to reflect on the transformative potential of individual and collective recognition. For those familiar with a lifetime of explaining our identities and seeking understanding, consider this: What would you do if it didn't matter in the end?

Exhibition text by Jenn Chan

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Robyn Mah explores their Chinese-Canadian identity through a multidisciplinary, material-led practice that engages with the complexities and banality of authenticity. Finding contemplation and nothing in the interrogation of the real and detailed surfaces of rocks and symbols that act as fragmented self-portraiture. Robyn makes rocks, paintings, and tattoos in Mohkinstsis.

Mah was The Bows 2025 BIPOC Artist in Residence.

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