stories in their own hand
Every family keeps a shoebox — the diaries, letters, ledgers and recipe cards of people who are gone, in scripts and hands that no one living can read. The box is opened once a decade, held, and closed again.
We turn the shoebox into an exhibition: the pages photographed to archival standard, deciphered, and mounted beside the story they tell — so a grandchild reads a life, and can always press a finger on the very line of ink that says so.
Nothing in an exhibition is invented. Every sentence of story belongs to one of four registers, and wears its label:
Read from the page and verified — cited to the leaf it came from.
Seen across many pages — every instance cited.
The history around the writer — labeled as backdrop, never put in their mouth.
What we cannot yet read or know — displayed openly, as museums do.
Where a reading was corrected, the correction stays visible. What is undeciphered is shown undeciphered. That is what makes the rest worth believing.
Each collection is private to its family. When a family chooses to share a story from theirs, it hangs here, in the public gallery.
The first page anyone could read — because someone finally held the book the way its writer did. With the page itself, and a button that turns it.
Thirteen leaves of a bilingual working diary — cursive Chinese with English pharmacopoeia terms — including one page that could only be read by turning the book upside down.