Guest curated by Ann Shi, the moon, the womb, and they remember features work by contemporary California-based artists Flora Kao, Sheng Lor, Victoria May, Sandeep Mukherjee, Kyong Boon Oh, Snežana Saraswati Petrović, and Stella Zhang. the moon, the womb, and they remember considers memory not as a fixed record but something embedded in material, labor and site. The exhibition approaches the womb not as a biological orgendered form but as a spatial logic: a container that holds matter in transition, allowingtransformation without resolution. The moon is a regulator of cyclical time, tides, illumination,recurrence, and ebb. It marks rhythms of appearance and disappearance, the return of time and space,the persistence of life forms, and the conservation of energy. Ann Shi’s exhibition co-creates a field with the site rather than linear narratives. At Angels Gate–a former military site overlooking the Port of Los Angeles–the works engage histories of movement, containment, and displacement embedded inthe landscape. The gallery becomes a temporary womb space: a container where layered temporalitiescoexist: ecological time, bodily time, migratory time.
Curatorial Narrative
the moon, the womb, and they remember considers memory not as a fixed record but somethingembedded in material, labor and site. The exhibition approaches the womb not as a biological orgendered form but as a spatial logic: a container that holds matter in transition, allowingtransformation without resolution. The moon is a regulator of cyclical time, tides, illumination,recurrence, and ebb. It marks rhythms of appearance and disappearance, the return of time and space,the persistence of life forms, and the conservation of energy. Ann Shi’s exhibition co-creates a fieldwith the site rather than linear narratives. At Angels Gate–a former military site overlooking the Port ofLos Angeles–the works engage histories of movement, containment, and displacement embedded inthe landscape. The gallery becomes a temporary womb space: a container where layered temporalitiescoexist: ecological time, bodily time, migratory time.
the moon, the womb, and they remember explores memory not as a fixed archive but as something that moves through bodies, materials, labor, and place. Rather than looking backward for answers, the exhibition asks how the past continues to live within the present.The womb is approached not as a biological symbol, but as a spatial idea — a structure that holds, shelters, and allows transformation. The moon functions as a regulator of time, shaping tides and rhythmsthat connect ocean, atmosphere, and the human body. Together, they offer a way of understanding time as cyclical rather than linear, where return is part of renewal. Viewers enter this field as participants ratherthan witnesses; as in quantum theory, observation alters relation, and memory becomes something co-created in the act of encounter.
Situated above the Port of Los Angeles, Angels Gate Cultural Center stands within a landscape defined by movement and exchange. The port operates as both threshold and refuge — receiving, sustaining, and releasing. Just offshore, Terminal Island was once home to a thriving Japanese fishing community before wartime incarceration and forced removal. That history lingers in the shoreline and surrounding military structures. The site carries memory not as monument, but as presence.
The exhibition reimagines San Pedro itself as a womb-like harbor: a place of holding and passage. Worksin the exhibition reflect on labor — weaving, binding, tending, assembling — as acts of care and continuity. These gestures resist speed and spectacle, offering instead attention and duration.
Rather than presenting a single narrative, the moon, the womb, and they remember proposes the gallery as a temporary chamber where layered histories coexist. In a landscape shaped by displacement and circulation, the exhibition returns to cyclical time — lunar, ecological, bodily — suggesting that what has moved through this site does not disappear. It remains in relation, carried forward across land, water, and community.