Breaking out

The installation Crossing is the centerpiece of Chiang Yomei's show in Hong Kong. Shoes have a symbolic meaning in Chiang's works. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"As I never got to say goodbye to my grandfather, I felt the only thing that connected me to the essence of him was the last pair of slippers he wore," Chiang Yomei tells China Daily in an e-mail interview.

She says shoes and the feet they protect have a symbolic resonance: People's feet keep them grounded and transport them from place to place. Chinese people often embroider lotuses or ladders on funerary shoe soles to symbolize the "crossing over to the pure realm of enlightenment".

She has inscribed the Sanskrit word ah, considered a symbol of transcendence in Buddhism, on the soles of the shoes at her show. And she chose the inner sole instead of the outer, which suggests the crossing is an inward one. "We come home to our true selves."

She also relates to memories and people's existence in her Cabinet series of which several installations are part of the same exhibition.

"I have always been interested in doors and interior spaces," she says.

"A cabinet opened is a world revealed. Cabinets and drawers are places of secrets and memories; with one action we open up endless dimensions of our existence."

In one work of the series, titled The Cabinet of Dreams, she attached a pair of paper baby shoes, the same as those used in Crossing, to a mirror inside an open cabinet. The shoes bear images of her as a child, her parents and grandparents.

"A dream begets a dream ad infinitum. Memories and thoughts are like this.

"But at the end of the day all these memories ... have no reality, they are mere illusions of the mind, phantoms that are empty of any identity."

Jasmine Yan, director of Sotheby's Hong Kong gallery, says Chiang Yomei's works are rooted in Buddhism, and she applies contemporary techniques with traditional Chinese materials and crafts that are being forgotten or lost.

"The exhibition is curated around all these elements, focusing on works that are visually bold with unusual textures yet bring a certain calmness and contemplation," says Yan.

Although living in Britain for decades, Chiang Yomei says she considers herself more of Chinese sensibilities than European.