Lige Qiao, window view, 2025
“However, at some point, everyone experiences a breakdown.
When reality does not follow expectations, when everything changes except you, when you feel alone, when you are displaced regardless of your will, or when you must say goodbye to people you love—something collapses. The strong heart that once moved forward begins to lose its direction and circles back.
At that moment, we might say: come, have a seat.”
When reality does not follow expectations, when everything changes except you, when you feel alone, when you are displaced regardless of your will, or when you must say goodbye to people you love—something collapses. The strong heart that once moved forward begins to lose its direction and circles back.
At that moment, we might say: come, have a seat.”
Admitting mistakes and ignorance is not easy. Humans are conditioned to pursue perfection, even though we are always imperfect. Revealing imperfection to others feels like surrendering to fate. However, once this internal taboo is broken—even if we don’t know when it was formed—you can be revived as someone who knows when to pause and redirect.
Learning embraces this desire for perfection. It surrounds everything: we learn how to live, speak, be intelligent, get along with others, belong to society, love, and maintain relationships. Life becomes a continuous process of learning. As long as we are living in this wonderful and strange world, we are required to keep learning. Turning away from it may feel like going against our instincts.
However, at some point, everyone experiences a breakdown. When reality does not follow expectations, when everything changes except you, when you feel alone, when you are displaced regardless of your will, or when you must say goodbye to people you love—something collapses. The strong heart that once moved forward begins to lose its direction and circles back. At that moment, we might say: come, have a seat.
In the middle of this race of learning, there are chairs. There are also people around you who make you sit, gently insisting that you stay. They might say, “You can stay as long as you want.” The path of learning is not a straight line. Sometimes, we need time to pause, to forget what we have done, and to re-navigate.
As an abstract metaphor for pausing before transition, the chair speaks of unlearning. Chairs exist in a state of limbo, like unlearning itself. We study, but we also rest on chairs. We enjoy solitude, but we also have conversations on them. We sit even while we are on our way somewhere. Chairs become the place where unlearning happens without us noticing—between farewell and arrival, oblivion and memory, discomfort and comfort, pausing and continuing.
Unlearning Languages
Most of the time, people do not recognise that they are in a moment of unlearning. I did not. I was an international student who had just arrived in Sydney a year ago, filled with high expectations. I had only recently started to speak English more freely, and it felt like becoming a baby in a second life. But in this second life, I had to learn everything twenty times faster. It was overwhelming: mimicking accents, blaming myself for not speaking properly, feeling embarrassed about my English writing. Yet this was also a process of unlearning.
In leaving Korea, I was also forgetting what I had built over twenty-five years. At the same time, a desire grew—to become a perfect part of Sydney. Ironically, this desire created another cycle of learning. Eventually, I became burnt out. The confusion about what I should pursue became painful.
I decided to take a short trip back to Seoul and seek counselling. On my way back to Sydney, I encountered an art review magazine on the flight. In an interview, Ulay described his separation from Marina Abramović as a process of unlearning. For him, unlearning meant searching for his identity again by letting go of the values that had previously justified him.
What I experienced was similar. I was obsessed with being acknowledged and validated by others and by the environment I was in. Rather than trying to speak like a native speaker and constantly censoring myself to produce perfect sentences, I needed unlearning—to build a more durable confidence and my own voice. Learning a language does not necessarily mean learning someone else’s voice.
Moon Boyoung calls this unlearning a “parachute bird.” Parachute Bird reflects second-language speakers who are struggling to fly but keep failing or bumping into a transparent window that the bird cannot sense. Boyoung, I, and all second-language speakers can barely realise what we are speaking wrong, like a parachute bird.The speaker is frustrated by the sense of losing words (= losing world) in Parachute Bird. She ends up giving up the English poetry class and deciding to be the bird in the free cage. When asked what kind of language speaker she wants to be, she answers, “I am definitely probably a bird” — it’s neither Korean nor English. Then, she quietly rebels against her professor; the memory of her English words is heavier for her than for her professor. In the middle of her struggles, she invites Korean speakers and English speakers into her birdcage so that she can be free with her own language — perhaps an exotic and unique English or Korean. Even though she says, “I drop this class,” she becomes free while she is in free fall with a parachute. Unlearning, from the frustration of never fully grasping the subtle sense of English, gives her the courage to invite others into her world.
This exophonic invitation is also presented in Sirinya Stuebe’s Langhwaje series, which includes ceramics and shared-meal performances. It challenges the false authority of native English speakers that Asian-Australians often confront as Thai-Australian. On the food painted on the ceramics and on the real sticky rice, words that are not easily decipherable are printed. It invites us into an irony we have encountered even before we fully realised it—when we learn, understand, and enjoy different cultures. What comes easily, and what comes lazily? It interrupts privilege and calls people together into a neutral space, where distorted English enables us to unlearn what we have been fixed to and relearn from the same stage.
If loving is also learning, what do we need to do when it’s left? The chair is the space people and their warmth is coming and leaving constantly. Cherishing, digesting the love has passed and letting them go could come after the busy love. Estelle Yoon, Cassandra Karam, and Liana Berzins touch the seats, the warmth of memories leaving or staying there invisible slowly.
Estelle Yoon’s Portrait of My Mother depicts the presence of absence. In her eyes, and on the empty chair, the warmth of her late mother remains. Puzzling through the debris of moments of her mother that Yoon has never fully known becomes a repetition of melting and freezing. Like the solid surface of a frozen lake, the emotions and memories of that moment seem as if they could be held forever—unchanged, firmly frozen in place. Yet, all of it will eventually melt, flowing away and disappearing somewhere. If another word for forgetting could be unlearning, it always arrives without warning—just like not knowing when the ice will finally melt away. By sealing the photographic record of that moment in glass, Yoon suggests that the unlearning of memory means that, although we may still recall and see it, we can no longer touch it.
Cassandra Karam captures the sorrow of displacement. Karam gently invites the people she loves in Lebanon into a single chair through her paintings. Holding You Here and three other works can be read like letters to those she cannot meet at this moment due to distance and complicated circumstances. She connects people who sit alone, enduring stillness. Longing, solitude, and grief follow after the farewell of being together. Being apart becomes a helpless moment of unlearning from what has shaped us.
Liana Berzins’ practice engages with Latvian folklore as an ongoing cycle of learning and unlearning. Berzins draws from the traditions and myths of Latvian culture—from a hundred years ago to the present, and here—in her own way. Her drawings are countless attempts to approach a culture that is physically and temporally distant, yet embedded within her. Through improvisation—particularly in her fluid and uncontrolled watercolour technique—she begins to loosen and reshape fixed forms and meanings. Stories, interwoven with her memories, imagination, and inherited myths, are rearticulated into her own artistic language as they emerge and float on the surface. In this sense, unlearning does function as a transitional moment—where inherited forms are adjusted, reinterpreted, and touched by her own gesture in order to be spoken from the present.
Unlearning everyday life
Unlearning is deeply attached with the concept of “being busy - busyness.” We are often forced to be productive in urban city life. People should keep moving from here pursuing productivity and speed physically and mentally. Lige Qiao and Sirinya Stuebe address the sense of sitting somewhere to trace the neglected feeling from the busyness.
Lige Qiao traces the journey on moving seats in Chongqing during their residency last January. Ironically, we are always sitting somewhere while we are moving. In glimpses of busy life, temporarily staying on a bus or metro can become a grey area in limbo between rest and work. What can we try there while the transportation is working instead of us? The riddle that unproductivity blooms in the pursuit of productivity provides us with a moment of unlearning as doing nothing. In window view, Qiao discovers the hidden flow of colourful, digitalised luminosity while editing video recordings of the durational window view on the bus. Like this discovery from an unlearning moment, this city archival practice is not just tracing and following the flow of movement, but also discovering and stretching what we have missed in our low-key lives where people are living.
Coming back to Sirinya Stuebe’s another practice, two multi-sensory textile books draw us to a forgotten phase of our own bodies. In a busy world, our existence sometimes becomes transparent. Through evoking and soothing our senses, they recall what we have unlearned through learning systems that exclude ourselves. In particular, Baby Book makes a conversation with Prekshika Todi’s Långfingerstol about the embodied processes of reproduction and bodily transformation. By giving space to reflect on how our own systems work, it stimulates unlearning within us.
Unlearning Chairs presents, physically, a number of chairs where anyone can have a seat. With the support of the UNSW Art & Design Master of Design cohort, six chairs are designed by designers who dismantle existing chairs and recreate them, breathing their own gestures into them. Some chairs are also collected or hired from vendors in Haymarket. I am very grateful to realise this practice in Haymarket. Haymarket has long been a locus of both the settlement of diverse cultures and the transformation of commodities. Historically, it functioned as a temporary stopping place for traders and farmers—a site where mobility shaped the rhythms of exchange. With continuous waves of change and the arrival of new cultures, Haymarket becomes a place where unlearning and relearning occur back and forth between Australian culture and multiple other cultures. I would like to invite you to take a seat, and to spend a moment of unlearning, undoing, and forgetting what you are holding closely at this moment, within Unlearning Chairs at the heart of Haymarket.
Details (4)