Future Relics
By Joshua Lue Chee Kong
Future Relics is a body of work exploring diasporic identity, ancestry, and belonging through the lens of Hakka Chinese Caribbean heritage. Blending traditional craft with contemporary technology, the works imagine artifacts from a speculative future that preserve the histories, resilience, and presence of communities shaped by migration and cultural exchange.
Future Relics
Future Relics is an ongoing body of work that brings together my explorations of diasporic identity, ancestry, and the shifting landscapes of home. The series shows how histories travel through bodies and across generations, and how identities are continually shaped through movement, migration, and cultural exchange.
As a Hakka Chinese artist from Trinidad, my practice is deeply informed by the creolized nature of Caribbean culture; identities are not singular but formed through layered encounters between cultures, languages, and histories. This condition of constant blending and adaptation influences both the conceptual and material foundations of my work. Traditional processes such as ceramics and bronze casting are combined with contemporary technologies like 3D scanning and 3D printing, mirroring the way identities evolve through encounters between past and present.
Central to this work is the body as an archive. By incorporating scans and casts of my own form, the work acknowledges the body as a vessel carrying inherited memory, survival, and transformation across generations. These forms are stand-ins for broader diasporic experiences, where displacement and adaptation produce new ways of belonging.
The project also emerges from a realization that many diasporic histories risk disappearing without deliberate acts of preservation. Future Relics imagines objects that might one day function as evidence of our existence; artifacts discovered in a distant future that affirm the presence and contributions of Caribbean Chinese communities. The works exist in a liminal space where past and future intersect, blurring whether the viewer is encountering remnants of history or speculative objects yet to come.
Materiality plays a symbolic role in this dialogue. Bronze surfaces reference ancestral memory and historical weight, while chrome-like finishes gesture toward speculative futures. Their reflective qualities invite viewers to see themselves within the work, implicating them in the ongoing conversation around identity, migration, and belonging.
While grounded in my personal history, Future Relics ultimately seeks to create space for shared reflection. The works invite viewers to consider their own relationships to home, inheritance, and cultural transformation, recognizing identity not as fixed, but as something continuously formed through exchange, resilience, and imagination.
The Creation of Future Relics
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