Why Don’t We Leave Home? Understanding Chinese Collective Living Culture
Jamie Leong
Why Don’t We Leave Home? Understanding Chinese Collective Living Culture is an experiential installation that transforms ordinary Chinese household ephemera into life-sized spaces, offering a new way of understanding the values that drive and define Chinese collective living.
The project begins with a simple premise: the meaning of something is never fixed. We understand through lived experiences, personal memories, and cultural contexts. Within many shared Chinese homes, ordinary household ephemera—such as red envelopes or fragments of food packaging—often become carriers of deeper values like cultural preservation and care, values that drive and define Chinese collective living.
By unfolding these ephemera into life-sized spaces—resembling that of floor plans—participants are invited to move through these spaces containing reflections from members of the global Chinese diaspora. Together, these voices and objects make visible the cultural values that drive and define collective living across many Chinese communities.