Home-O-Stasis: Life and Livelihoods in Flushing
Home-O-Stasis: Life and Livelihoods in Flushing was an exhibition organized by Lu Zhang and Herb Tam, inside a Flushing mini-mall created as offerings to those seeking housing by artists with close ties to Flushing, Queens. Exhibition was on view 7 days a week during the mall’s open hours: 10am-8pm. Featuring Janice Chung, Mamahuhu (Yuki He and Qianfan Gu), Herb Tam, Xueli Wang, Xiyadie, Anne Wu, and Lu Zhang.
Home-O-Stasis: Life and Livelihoods
exhibition documentation
2023
Home-O-Stasis: Life and Livelihoods in Flushing was an exhibition organized by Lu Zhang and Herb Tam, inside a Flushing mini-mall created as offerings to those seeking housing by artists with close ties to Flushing, Queens. Exhibition was on view 7 days a week during the mall’s open hours: 10am-8pm. Featuring Janice Chung, Mamahuhu (Yuki He and Qianfan Gu), Herb Tam, Xueli Wang, Xiyadie, Anne Wu, and Lu Zhang.
Flushing as verb
The Mall is not only a neighborhood center where strivers renew bargain phone data plans, shop for essentials at the 99 cent store, get their hair done at the beauty salon, send care packages with the China delivery service, and buy groceries at the mini-grocer/butcher shop; but also serves another crucial function: as a place to look for home.
Flushing as mirage
The mall’s glass bulletin boards are a zone between hope and reality where prospective renters consider bare descriptions, written in Chinese, of places that might become temporary homes: a night-to-night bed in a living room for female renters on Ash Avenue; a small room in a subdivided apartment full of construction workers on Maple Avenue. On weekday mornings, people crowd around a grid of printed and hand-written postings, read them attentively, make calls, and dash off to see spaces in a hyper-local house hunting ecosystem.
For them, Xiyadie has made a delicate papercut butterfly, a symbol of renewal, rebirth and mobility, whose body takes the form of a Flushing landmark–the U-haul clocktower on College Point Blvd, which for a long time, stood as one of the neighborhood’s tallest structures. As a migrant worker himself, Xiaydie delivered the work with a prayer that it would bring protection and good fortune to other workers seeking home.
Xueli Wang’s photographic and text piece interrupt and blend in with the other postings by offering intimate messages and documentation of the act of their installation, a feedback loop inspired by the acts of care that undergird this otherwise transactional home-hunting system.
Janice Chung’s photographic series Han in Town (Koreatown) is a love letter to Flushing’s Korean community who have been displaced from downtown to its north and east. For Home-O-Stasis, Chung features the portrait and story of Jinglan, a dumpling shop owner of Korean descent who grew up in China. Her store has become a place where Korean and Chinese customers and workers share food and conversation in an example of Flushing’s ethnic zones intersecting.
Flushing as adjective
Flushing is a neighborhood where collective memory constantly peeks through the surface, like the faint remains of shop signage hinting at what used to be. In Flushing, memory lingers as both a delicate collective archive of what might be gone too soon and as a functional alternate map. For example, It’s so Flushing not to know the name of a place, but only as that dumpling refrigerator next to the Q65 bus stop.
Mamahuhu (Yuki He and Qianfan Gu) created Flushing Polyphonous, a playful reimagining of the neighborhood as a Monopoly game board full of Flushing landmarks, both official and highly personal, hoping to help newcomers recognize Flushing as a welcoming community.
Herb Tam capture neighborhood residents engrossed in their interactions bathed in the glow of Flushing’s street lamps, its late afternoon summer light, and its neon signage. Painted briskly, they show Flushing’s public spaces–its parks, sidewalks and restaurants–as an extension of home.
Lu Zhang’s ceramic Nokia 8210 phone and arrangement of fake flowers recalls and memorializes the large phone that used to sit atop the mall’s facade like a crown jewel before it was taken down during the pandemic. It was part of store signage for the budget phone plan dealer inside, but in Lu’s re-working has become an emblem for the life-giving force of social and emotional connectivity that stretch to homelands far away from Flushing. It’s also a time machine with a pixelated screen image of the landscape before the Dutch settled and named it Vlissengen after a city in the Netherlands.
Anne Wu, who grew up in Flushing, shows the pages of a calendar stripped of its days and symbols, leaving a pure architecture of time. The blanks lead backwards to what is already forgotten.
DREAM CITY 2.0
The Dream City that Exists in Dreams
If an ambitious development called Dream City had been realized in the 1940s, the building you’re standing in would have been demolished to make way for an expansive effort to remake downtown Flushing. Manhattan developers Webb & Knapp envisioned Dream City as a multi-block complex of office and retail buildings connected by climate controlled sidewalks, subterranean shopping thoroughfares with moving platforms shuttling people from store-to-store, spacious parking lots, a grand theater on the scale of Radio City Music Hall, night clubs and more. They surely were enticed by the promises of post World War II Flushing: a middle class population surge and new transportation infrastructure bringing travellers and shoppers to Dream City by subway, automobile, rail and even on jet planes. Perhaps they were inspired by the “World of Tomorrow” theme of the 1939-40 World’s Fair held at Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Its “Democrocity” exhibit inside the domed Perisphere moved visitors above a scale model of an ideal city of the future.
The idea of Dream City as a futuristic destination mall and business center fell apart when the city refused to enforce eminent domain and widen streets, but its name conjures a different ideal worth considering.
We propose creating a city of places, not from an imagined future, but of our Flushing memories. In your dreams, what Flushing places that no longer exist would you want to bring back? Write your responses on our Dream City 2.0 plan to contribute to a collective memory map of personal landmarks–a city made up of all of our memory-fueled dreams of Flushing.