My Mother’s Tongue Ties Me Together

My Mother’s Tongue Ties Me Together features three contemporary artists who are wading through cultural ambiguity to unravel their relationships to home. Using various material languages, the artists aim to locate themselves amidst emotional and geographic placelessness. Portraits, structures, and intimate memories overlap to reconstruct stories and honor entire lifetimes. 

Noelle Choy’s multi-faceted objects and video explore counternarratives and reenact unreliable and haunted memories with levity to process immense grief and longing.

Hùng Lê’s textile collages and video investigate the fragility of memories by reconstructing personal stories and shared histories to define and redefine individual identity and challenge the authorship of history.

Merry Sun deconstructs facets of her homeland through architectural installations that are activated with sound and facilitate movement and migration to echo memories of her past. 

This exhibition was organized in partnership with Charlotte Street. Since 1997, the Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards and accompanying exhibitions have celebrated the outstanding achievements of contemporary artists living in the Kansas City area. The Spencer Museum of Art is honored to host this exhibition of the 2025 awardees. Support for this exhibition and related programs comes from Friends of the Art Museum, KU Student Senate, and the Linda Inman Bailey Exhibitions Fund.

The artists in this exhibition would like to extend their gratitude to the following individuals for their assistance, advisement, and overall support, without which this exhibition would not have been possible: Collin Choy, Cooper Siegel, Leina Wann, Mitchell Kirkwood, Ken Honas, Chris Honas, Hìên Lê, Bình Lê, HoYin Cho, and Joe Meinecke.

Images by Ryan Waggoner, © Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas