Institution Gaps

2025-ongoing

I install miniature unlicensed “entrances” in the narrow gaps between art institutions and the buildings around them, occupying the liminal space between museum and city. The project plays with two ideas: the gap and the entrance. The gap is a marginal space that leads to nowhere, while the entrance suggests access, legitimacy, and a way inside. By inserting a miniature parallel entrance where no entrance should exist, the work focuses how visibility, permission, and scale are structured at the edge of the institution. 

The structures borrow from the logic of small Earth God shrines in Hong Kong and Macau, often found at ground level in the gaps between buildings. These shrines are small-scale, site-specific, unofficial, and maintained by local people rather than a centralized religious system. Their entrances do not open onto a physical interior, but symbolically face the Earth God, protector of the land and its people.

The project sets the gap against the entrance, and the art institution against the religious system. The gap becomes a site, and the entrance becomes a fantasy. Shaped by my position as a young international artist drawn to the institution but uncertain of my place within it, these miniature entrances use the language of access to reflect on desire, exclusion, and the possibility of existing beside the institution in another way.