Mother Wound at Remote Gallery
Remote Gallery, Toronto, Canada
October 24 - November 2, 2024
Lotus Che’s first solo exhibition, Mother Wound, invites us into a world where art becomes a bridge between the seen and unseen, the conscious and unconscious, transmuting the ineffable into a profound artistic experience.
Through charcoal, paint, ink, textile, and clay, Che constructs spiritual mindscapes that confront life’s most complex thresholds: trauma, death, healing, and rebirth. The exhibition unfolds like a psychic landscape: intimate, ceremonial, and unflinching in its devotion to truth-telling.
Che’s works are arranged to mirror the introspective nature of their practice. The exhibition unfolds as both an archive and a ritual of repair. Engaging with Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow, the repressed unconscious that connects all humans, Che’s art becomes a link between the personal and the collective, transforming buried emotion into universal form.
At its core, the exhibition explores the psychic and emotional architecture of female interiority — the places where pain becomes language and silence becomes material. Rather than performing emotion for the viewer, Che transforms it into ritual. The exhibition insists that the raw, embodied states historically dismissed as “too much” are, in fact, sites of profound intelligence.
The work stands as a testament to resilience and the pursuit to remember one’s wholeness. It addresses oppression, violence, loss, and intergenerational wounding while retaining moments of humor and childlike playfulness. This delicate tension between gravity and levity invites viewers into a space that is both confronting and consoling.
In exploring identity, memory, gender, motherhood, invisible labour, feminism, sexuality, and power dynamics, Che offers an unfiltered encounter with the psyche. The work’s intimacy lies in its courage to hold both vulnerability and eroticism without apology. These are not gestures of confession but of reclamation, acts of self-love that embrace even the disowned or forbidden aspects of being — the darkest parts that society often compels us to repress.
Emerging from a past marked by control and violation, Che’s practice reclaims agency through form. Bold lines carve presence out of absence, while abstraction and figuration collapse into one another. The result is a language of emotional precision, images that oscillate between ecstasy and lament, between the body’s cry for freedom and its capacity for joy.
Color is scarce, limited to the stark interplay of black, white, and flesh. This palette amplifies polarity: life and death, love and rage, strength and fragility coexisting in the same breath.
The clay vessels at the centre of Mother Wound deepen this inquiry. Hand-built and raw, they evoke the body as both container and conduit. Each vessel holds the residue of care, exhaustion, and renewal, metaphors for the mother who empties herself repeatedly and now reclaims the right to be full. “This work is me filling my cup,” Che writes. The vessels serve as psychic containers, holding the energies and emotions that flow through the gallery like invisible water.
Che’s work resists the cultural habit of aestheticizing women’s pain while erasing its origins. Here, emotional intensity becomes a form of knowledge, an embodied intelligence that refuses simplification. The so-called hysteria of women’s experience is reframed as memory, not madness: the body remembering what the world once demanded it forget.
Deeply vulnerable yet fiercely grounded, Che’s art does not seek catharsis but coherence. It invites the viewer to witness, not consume, to recognize that healing is not the erasure of darkness but the integration of it.
Across more than 180 works, Mother Wound becomes an unfolding cosmology, a living testament to the human condition in its most raw and radiant forms. Brutally honest and tenderly rendered, the exhibition asserts that remembering itself is a political act.
Rather than perform pain, Che metabolizes it. In doing so, they establish a new visual and emotional lexicon for contemporary art, one rooted in ritual, emotional sovereignty, and psychic repair.
Curated by Lotus Che & Yuluo Anita Wei with copywriting assistance from Vai Jong-Hunken. Presented in partnership with SSEW Project, Trastienda Machete, 202AM & Peggy.
Copyright © Lotus Che, Inc. 2025.
All rights reserved.