Hemorrhoid Loans Series, Chapter II

A Table Without Us takes a Lunar New Year dinner as a scene of bodily debt.

The work looks at how care, silence, shame, money and undigested emotions are distributed through food, seating arrangements, festive rituals and objects of cleaning. On the surface, the dining table represents reunion and abundance. In the work, however, it becomes more like an inflamed body: complete, lively and expensive on the outside, yet swollen and blocked within.

The table keeps an account: who eats, who refuses, who pays, who sits aside, who swallows, who wipes, who carries the leftovers home.

This exhibition is the second chapter of Yu Shuk Pui Bobby’s ongoing series Hemorrhoid Loans 《痔債》, which uses hemorrhoids as an entry point to think about chronic pain, shame, family history, care, labour and the social conditions that teach us to endure discomfort silently.