Traditionally, craft has been an artistic, social and utilitarian practice, by which women negotiate their relationships in the familial and social spheres. Following this tradition, the artists in Shaping the Orbit use ceramic, textile, paper cutting and assemblage to articulate the transient nature of their own experience of cultural crossing and displacement as postmodern travellers. Ying-Yueh Chuang, Li Chai and Karen Tam move between locales shaping, cutting, weaving and stitching out orbits of their life, now and again revisiting (her)story of womanly work.

It is on various locales that the three Chinese-Canadian women’s stories in this exhibition unfold. From Taiwan to Vancouver to Halifax, Ying-Yueh Chuang lived surrounded by the sea, itself a symbol of voyage and impermanence. Gathering, saving and studying sea plants and natural materials, Chuang chose to work with clay, focusing on organic forms, structures, textures and colours. After moving to Toronto, Chuang’s fascination with the city’s inland setting prompted her to contemplate the meaning of rooting to a specific locale. It is this transition from the sea to land that Chuang developed in her Plant-Creature series, which depict hybrid ceramic forms of the sea, the land and her imagination. This reflection on rooting led her to recollect an important philosophical ideal in Chinese culture, which is the forming of familial and societal wholeness through grounding on a piece of land. The ceramic installation +(Cross) conveys Chuang’s understanding of the philosophy that propagates the integration of heaven, earth and human (天、地、人). This philosophical idea is articulated in the configuration of Chinese characters. From the composition of Chinese word "field" (田 ) , Chuang borrows the basic structure for the work +(Cross). In her work, Chuang creates an artificial ideal of a paradise, in which memories are emerging and submerging from the sea to land, with the traveller’s traces fervently contained.

Just like the cross in the centre of the word "field" (田 ) in Chuang’s work signifies paths going up and down and across a field, Li Chai sees the manipulation of the warp and weft threads of her computerized Jacquard weaving as the metaphor for traversing between places. Voyaging back and forth between China and Canada, Chai’s experience of pregnancy and childbirth (while pursuing an MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) are interwoven within the trajectories of her travel. These diary-like entries became the main texts and images woven on her textile series M Body Watch. With the computerized Jacquard loom, detailed photographic images, such as the ultrasound picture of Chai’s unborn child in Embryo, are reproduced on the fabric. These textile works hang from the gallery ceiling, resembling life-size garments, suggesting the spectre of a transforming body in different places and time.

Chai’s work shares symbolic meaning and value with the long tradition of textile production by generations of Chinese women. However, historians and even feminists researching in gender role have largely neglected its economic and social values.1 Chai’s use of textile as her artistic medium is metaphorical for her struggle of shifting roles between a working artist and mother. Perhaps the lowbrow attitude towards textile work and other craft practices in the high art world today is reminiscent of the neglect of womanly work in traditional societies.

Karen Tam’s family has been running Chinese restaurants in Montreal for more than three decades. Fascinated by how cultural symbols and exotic "Oriental" objects are transformed and translated in order to cater to racial stereotypes, she started to collect objects and images within the restaurants such as take out menus and rice bags, re-arranging and remaking them in paradoxical ways. Tam also became interested in paper-cutting, a traditional women’s craft, often used as window decorations and for ritualistic purposes. MSG and Buddha Health Food & Vegetarian Delight depicts a laughing Buddha, a popular symbol and religious icon of good luck and longevity, who is holding a round plaque with the letters "MSG" (monosodium glutamate) written on it. Although MSG has been widely used in non-Chinese restaurants and other food products, its negative effect has always been linked to Chinese food and by extension, to the perceived irresponsibleness of Chinese restaurant owners. Tam’s MSG and Buddha is a parody of this syndrome and also of the perpetuation of this stereotype by the Chinese restaurateurs themselves.

The woven plastic strips of large rice bags is the surface for Tam’s cross-stitched work The Canadian Pacific Railway: The Only Route Between the East and West. Each stitch assimilates a step that moves along the surface of the bag acting as a metaphor for the displacement that 19^{th century Chinese railroad workers in Canada experienced. The title parodies an advertisement slogan, the East and West denoting the continent from coast to coast. On the other hand, is Tam also implying that at the end of 19th Century, the only route (relationship) between the East (China) and the West is one of exploitation?}

The early railroad workers travelled from China to Canada by boat. Sailing Across a Vast Ocean, 100 000 Miles Apart is a work Tam collaborated with her mother Yuen Yin Law. The mother and daughter team collected cigarette foil from waiters and waitresses working in their restaurant. Folding them into tiny boats, they also resemble gold and silver ingots traditionally used for burning at ritual ceremonies as offerings to the ancestors and gods. In Sailing, the gold and silver ingots are arranged on a large piece of red paper composing a wave pattern. This floor installation is vibrant and shimmering yet underneath this glamour is a sense of anxiety. The voyage carries with it not a touristy light-heartedness, but a weighty apprehension of an unknown future - a sentiment that might still be shared by new immigrants longing for a better future on a new land.

Through their works, Chuang, Chai and Tam shape the orbits of their life with the hands that elicit the crossings of time, places, cultures and personal memories.

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