When Spring Never Comes (2024_ongoing)
“You never had those yellow slippers,” my mother insists, her certainty making my memory feel like a betrayal. Yet I see them so clearly—the yellow soles, the black braid- ed straps—left behind on the day we moved. I was four and that yellow slipper has stayed with me ever since. But did I ever own those slippers? Over time, this memory clings uneasily to me, leaving me to question which version of the past truly belongs to me.
Every border crossed, every moment of waiting, forces me to relive the fear, anger and uncertainty as I fled in Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. What I escaped has followed me here in Germany, where promises of safety are broken and the cycle of exile continues.
“When Spring Never Comes” explores how memory and uncertainty intertwines. Where the past and present constantly merge and reshape each other. It delves into the artist’s emotional toll of displacement, alienation, and the struggle to reconcile. The work reflects the tension between remembering and forgetting, absence and reconstruction, past and present, across the two lands.
-Freedom is a Leash
They call it freedom—
but it’s a leash, just long enough to let you think you’re running.
It disguised as choice,
a door that only opens one way.
Speak too loud, move too fast—
watch how quickly the hands tighter
They measure your steps,
your voice on hold,
your body in borders.
Call it peace.
Call it justice.
Call it anything,
but whatever it is.
At first,
you don’t feel it.
Not until you pull.
Not until you choke.
A part of me has become the forest, rooted and unmoving, waiting for a wind that will never come.
It matters not who departs first; the human condition is to linger in absence, to pass through stillness and invent meaning from the void.
We wait, tethered by hope, even when spring never comes....
