Art is never
the object alone.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre shapes places
where makers and viewers belong.
In 'Silent Echoes' Benny Or uses the yoke-back chair as a symbol and motif to embody a deeply personal inner quest into his past.
Our world is filled with objects, most of which have a defined purpose and codified cultural significance, tied to class, usage, and perceived value. But objects, while having a broadly accepted overarching exterior status, can also carry an inner personal meaning which infuses them with intense intimate symbolism.
Introduced during the 10th century and popularized during the Ming Dynasty, the yoke-back chair is an iconic piece of Chinese furniture and has been a staple of Chinese homes for centuries. Also dubbed the ‘official’s hat chair’ for its horizontal crest, the extremities of which are ideal to hang a hat, this seat carries the aura of its long standing presence and charged history.
In the past year, Benny Or, celebrated designer and self taught artist has been on a journey towards self discovery through personal history and especially the uncovering of his mother’s lineage’s past. Benny’s family was powerful in pre-communist China. His great grandmother was a reputed shamanic healer in the 1930s. During the communism take over of the late 30s/early 40s, the family was depleted of its wealth and Benny’s great grandfather, a court official, hung himself. The family ultimately lost everything.
Learning about this past deeply impacted Benny, who started feeling an intense connection to this great grandmother matriarchal figure and her shamanic gifts. As Benny started painting, exploring the presence and essence of everyday culturally significant objects, the figure of the yoke-back chair started haunting him. The chair, a traditional representation and symbol, but also functionally a tool for the body to rest and be held, evoking past, lineage, reverence for institutional knowledge and craftsmanship, became a vehicle and connecting point for his inner explorations of this newfound familial past.
As one enters ‘Silent Echoes’ they immerse themselves in a darkly painted room, a monochrome environment mirroring the artist’s studio’s colored walls. In it, a small close up black and white oil portrait of a woman, the only image Benny has of his great grandmother, blurred and textured, is surrounded by a series of precisely painted yoke-back chairs portrayed from various angles. These paintings are simple, minimal representations made to outline the sinuous nature of a re-perspectived past.
Facing the portrait, a toppled yoke-back chair brings to mind the downfall of a certain way of life, or even more intimately, the artist’s great grandfather’s final moments in their silent violence. A couple of identical chair crests, side by side evoke the mirroring aspects of transgenerational connections. Cropped unusual angles made paintings become almost abstract, as to express a broader story recomposed from disparate sporadic anecdotal details. A metal plated sculpture warped representation of the iconic seat-a reference to silver as a means to convert property into movable assets-lives at the edge of physical reality and inner projections, in the inbetween occupied by a narrated history which can only remain incomplete while still having tangible ramifications in the present.
In the space, plays a song, 等著你回來 (Waiting for you come back), performed by 白光 (Bai Guang), famous singer and actress at the time when Benny’s family was leaving China. This song, which the artist discovered randomly and perceives as a message through which his shamanic matriarch whispers her calling: for her great grandson to come back to her.
“Silent Echoes" poses a poignant question: do we carry the echoes of our ancestral traumas, even without direct knowledge?
Photo: Alexander Laurent Rubalcava
Anne-Laure Lemaitre is a curator, writer, and producer based in New York, Paris, and the Nova Scotia wilderness. Her practice begins by questioning a territory: its physical and emotional dimensions, its history, its context, its belonging, before turning to the art it calls for. This orientation has shaped a body of work spanning the most experimental corners of the emerging art world and leading corporations and public institutions.
Many artists she has worked with early in their careers have since gone on to significant critical and market recognition. Those relationships rarely end with the exhibition. For several, she remains a resource: someone to think with, exchange with, workshop with.
For nearly twenty years, she has worked across scales and contexts: from intimate solo exhibitions at artist-run spaces to permanent public commissions, from single-artist career conversations to cultural programs spanning five continents. Her practice is built around the specific rather than the repeatable, treating the space, the institution, the sidewalk, and the online environment each as curatorial material in its own right.
Lemaitre writes regularly about art for catalogues, publications, and for herself. Her writing, whether commissioned or not, tends toward the felt rather than the prescribed: a belief that how we speak about a practice, and what it does to us, shapes how it is seen and received.
Intentional art programs · Site-specific commissions
Curatorial strategy · International practice
Art In Context is a curatorial production practice whose work ranges from international public commissions, corporate collections and multi-venue cultural strategies to ongoing collaborations with artists, brands and cultural institutions.
Every project begins with the same questions: what does this place need, what story belongs here, and who should tell it. That orientation shapes everything from artist selection and fabrication to the logic of how a program holds together in one location or across multiple sites.
Drawing on nearly twenty years of work, Art In Context has built the infrastructure to operate anywhere and at any scale. An extensive network of creative partners allows it to move from a single commission to a coordinated program spanning dozens of sites without losing the specificity that makes a project land. Art In Context works worldwide.