Being away from home has made artist Joshua Lue Chee Kong reflect on who he is as a Chinese Trinidadian.

That, along with being on lockdown in Toronto, Canada, was the inspiration for his latest body of work, Stay at Home.

He usually creates sculpture-based work, but because there was no access to a studio to make physical pieces in mid-2020, he created installations from work that was part of his thesis while he was at home.

Lue Chee Kong, 33, went to Canada in 2018 to do his masters degree in interdisciplinary studies of art at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. He graduated in June 2020 and was supposed to participate in exhibitions of the new graduates’ work, but they were cancelled because of the pandemic and the lockdown in Toronto at the time.

He explained that his masters thesis was about self-discovery of his identity as a Chinese Trinidadian living in Toronto. He called it Melting Pot: Casting a Caribbean Chinese Body.

“Being away from home I have been homesick, so for my thesis I focused on my own personal history. Being Chinese in Trinidad is a different experience from being Chinese in China. There are different diasporic connections that makes it similar but different. So I was exploring those disconnections.

“I was thinking of my own body and how it takes a lot of your ancestors for us to live in this present moment. My body is not just a genetic connection but also a spiritual connection to my ancestors.”

[caption id="attachment_908763" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Trinidadian artist Joshua Lue Chee Kong works on one of his sculptures. PHOTOS COURTESY JOSHUA LUE CHEE KONG -[/caption]

For the work he did a 3D scan of his body. This allowed him to crop parts and do 3D prints, create silicon moulds, and casts in plaster. He also hand-made various aspects of the pieces.

Since he could not exhibit his work, he created a few installations from it, as well as objects he had at home, not introducing anything from the outside, so people could have an idea of how he was living and the items with which he was living.

He shared a picture of one installation on Instagram and UWI lecturer Dr Marsha Pearce contacted him to do an interview for her conversation series, Quarantine and Art.

The article led to his being contacted by the Museum of Contemporary Art, London, to create a series of images documenting work he made during quarantine for a digital exhibition. He created 12 pieces for the Stay at Home Series, which ran from July 1-31.

“I had basically been at home from May 2020-July 2021.

“Because of the lack of studio access, I thought everything should be photo-based. I had all of this work that I created during my masters degree at home, so it was a nice way of expressing my story – the way I was feeling, the anxiety, the paranoia, missing home, missing the family, but ten times worse because it’s during a pandemic.”

It was also about being a Trinidadian in Toronto and the challenges of being an immigrant.

He told Sunday Newsday he likes to dabble in differen