From the Laurentian Highlands to a Higher Place

WOO SEE-MING — Members' Gallery

Shortly after his mother’s funeral, artist WOO SEE-MING made a pilgrimage to the Laurentian Highlands of Quebec.

It was there that his mother took up waitressing in the late 1950's. Despite speaking only French, she fell in love with a Chinese cook with whom she could barely communicate. The village priest refused to marry them. They then moved to Montreal. By accident, the artist would be born to them several years later.

In the final years of her life, WOO’s mother had wanted to see her village once more, but her health did not permit it. The church that had been central to her life, the partial ruins of the old paper factory where WOO’s grandfather had worked from the 1910s to the 1960s, the cemetery where generations of his ancestors are resting, and the house that his great-grandparents built with their own hands and in which his mother was born—photos taken in and around these sites in 2025 by WOO serve as the foundation of this exhibition where time, sadness, love and joy collapse into one.