Alison Wing Yin Poon: A Constructed Home

Tache presents A Constructed Home, the debut solo exhibition of London-based artist Alison Wing Yin Poon. The exhibition explores the nuances of mixed-heritage identity, material memory, and belonging, while engaging with contemporary debates surrounding cultural heritage and authenticity. Through sculptural installations, ceramics, and etchings, Poon examines our connection to the spaces we inhabit, combining found objects with ceramic, lacquer, and faux bois to evoke a sense of cross-cultural familiarity.

Poon, who comes from Malaysian-Chinese and English heritage, grounds her practice in tactile experimentation, playful storytelling, and curatorial thinking. Drawing on personal experiences and archives, domestic spaces, craft traditions, and cultural interactions, she creates installations that weave together lived experience and fiction. Her work explores how memories can romanticise the past, how cultures navigate and represent their histories and notions of “The Other,” and how these narratives evolve under the pressures of modernisation, capitalism, and questions of authenticity.

The artist examines Chinese culture through a distinctly Malaysian lens, animating her sculptural pieces with hybrid animal figures drawn from the iconography of Penang’s temples, alongside motifs inspired by everyday objects such as roof tiles, lightbulbs and Dressing Room mirrors. Her large-scale sculptures draw structural support from found furnishings in rattan and bamboo: materials traded between Malaysia and the UK during the colonial era, which remain commonplace in households around the world.