A home dislodged in an abstract proposition due to unprecedented post-colonial conditions, political trauma, and irreversible change. It tells a story of a plaster fragment from a house renovation. Speckled with blue water droplets and lying in a heap of white construction bags, it caught the attention of a stranger.                                                                                                                                                                                            

"If crying comes from inside a pair of eyeballs, perhaps what I saw was the inside of eyeballs."

The stranger sculpted the fragment into a pair of eyeballs and invited them to revisit the old home where they’d been left behind. But the home, unrecognisable, distorted the eyeballs, as if swollen after long crying. To settle, they split themselves in half: one for the lost past, one for the missing future.

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Co-presented by Jessie Tam, a pair of cut eyeballs, and a collection of unwanted household fragments, It Has to Be Apart\It Has to Be Alone is Tam’s first solo project in Hong Kong. A metaphorical mixed-media installation, a flashback role-play, and a booklet that cuts itself into many small parts—it all began with a plaster fragment, where things come in pairs and are cut in pairs.