Creating a Home: Steffie Chau’s ‘l’appartement 49c’
The charm of big city life still hasn’t worn off on me after one year of living in London. In my Washington, D.C. university, I drop place names like Notting Hill and Marylebone as if I’m playing Gretel, dropping precious breadcrumbs connecting me to home.
Despite my love for London and other big cities I have visited, the two words I would use to describe New York City are big and smelly.
New York City is built on a grid system. This is why you’ll hear New Yorkers referring to distances in ‘blocks’. When you open a map, the streets are laid out in rectangle after rectangle, guiding you down roads marked by a mishmash of numbers that are indecipherable to a non-native. It’s big – in my opinion, performatively so, like most Americanisms – the skyscrapers are so tall you have to tilt your head back to catch a glimpse of the skyline. The sewer and marijuana smell is unavoidable. On the 15th of September, the day of my visit, it was 25 degrees Celsius, and beautifully sunny – but the buildings remained grey and lifeless in my eyes.
I made my way up to Steffie Chau’s apartment – the site of her exhibition, l’appartement 49c. The number of floors was no joke, I realised, once I entered the lift. The array of buttons in front of me left me daunted. They filled up the panel on the wall and the numbers blurred together menacingly. Despite my initial hesitation, I pressed 49 and headed up to Steffie’s door.
My first-year accommodation had 11 floors. My friends and I thought we were the coolest kids around, hanging out on the top-floor balcony chain-smoking cigarettes and clattering around bottles of alcohol like teenage delinquents. We looked over the sights of Stratford as if we had laid claim to a kingdom.
In contrast to 49, 11 seems comical. Steffie welcomed me into her flat – a modest apartment, but with an enviable view of the New York City skyline. Her kitchenette was immediately to my right as I walked in, and her friends were crowded around the island counter talking. On the wall to my left, a mirror hung. On it, a menu hand-written in white pen advertising oat matcha and cold brew in a makeshift café. I immediately asked Steffie about the choice to implement a café in her exhibition.
“I made this part of my apartment very sterile,” she said, gesturing to the absence of any real furniture except a sofa, two tables and a record player. “Most of my stuff is in the bedroom. But I wanted to welcome people into my space and make them feel at home too.”
Home is one of the main themes of l’appartement 49c. Steffie Chau is a recent graduate from NYU, a university she moved from Hong Kong to attend. Whilst waiting on her visa that would enable her to work since her graduation in May, she turned her apartment into a workspace – crafting pieces that represented her transitional period between a university student and a working adult. In the same vein, her apartment became a transitional space for l’appartement 49c – not quite her apartment, not quite a gallery (her bathroom door was open, and the toilet brush stared at me conspicuously while I made the rounds to look at the exhibition).
The exhibition was filled with layers of grey and white, translucency, invoking images of a liminal space. Receipts, books, and playing card prints lined the walls — reminding one of a mundane waiting period, the strange sense of being stuck in a loop as you wait for life to move forward.
She also told me, rather abashedly, that she had put together all the pieces for this exhibition in the liminal waiting period from May to early August before she received her visa. I marvelled at her artistic output in no more than three months – and yet, nothing felt contrived or devoid of meaning. Everything in the exhibition I perceived to be close to Steffie’s heart, and her desire to create.
As we sat to discuss the exhibition further, I couldn’t help commenting on the largest piece of the collection. embrasse-moi, a 49x49 canvas hung above the sofa depicting two figures hugging under the light of a moon. The background is nondescript and it's unclear where they are, and I also found the two bodies to be indistinguishable. The figures blend into one another, at first glance it’s unclear where one begins and the other ends. As I looked closer, I found that the dark background is worn – glints of gold shine through the overlapping blues and greens that make up the night-time hue.
“I draw from memory,” Steffie clarified, “I draw from still life or memory.”
I asked about her idea of home, and how it's been influenced by the transition of her identity from being a university student, new to the US, to now, fighting to stay and work in the city she calls home rather than returning to Hong Kong.
“My family actually wanted me back,” she revealed, “and I wanted to go back, too.”
She told me about her break-up with her partner earlier this year, and how that influenced her perception of what her home was. She described a desire to not define New York City through him. She described her idea of her apartment as an egg – a symbol she’s fascinated by, which makes a cameo in various other pieces in the exhibition. An egg is a protection from the outer world, a place where she can feel safe, where she can grow and develop. She continually referenced the importance of food to this vision of home, which I could see by the central importance of the home café to the exhibition.
I smiled while she told me this, not out of politeness, but rather shock. Her experiences are so close to mine.
I left someone who wasn’t quite a partner at the same time that I left London. I, in fact, remember sitting on the 11th-floor balcony with him – looking out at the sunset, feeling like I was at some great turning point in my life. This idea of transitionality features in much of Chau’s work.
So much of London reminds me of him: Lincoln’s Inn Park, where we played card games during the heatwave; the Natural History Museum, where we went together; St Pancras Station, where he dropped me off on numerous occasions; Temple Station; Amorino; Hiba; Queensway; Chaiiwala; Guy’s Campus; any burger restaurant. Chau’s piece, portrait of a first love, an amalgamation of seemingly discordant parts reminds me of this, all these places with no linking thread, apart from a person I no longer talk to. These places took on meaning not because of what they were but because of my experiences that I had with them.
On the night I left my first-year accommodation, as I was saying goodbye to him, we both ended up in tears.
“I don’t know why I’m so sad,” I told him.
“You found a family here,” he said, looking at my empty walls, my stripped bed.
He was silent for a moment after saying this.
“Why are you crying?” I ask him, playful, reaching out to shove his shoulder, “You’re not the one leaving.”
“I don’t know, I just—” he said, “I don’t know that you’ll be at the end of the line anymore.”
I lived in Stratford, and he lived near Swiss Cottage – opposite ends of the Jubilee line. Yet, in that moment I felt his words take on some alternate meaning, as if imbued with something else that we couldn’t quite say. This memory to me, today, takes on a similar quality to embrasse-moi, the idea of a memory so often turned over that it has become worn from frequent handling. It doesn’t matter exactly where my hands were, and whether he was crying or laughing – the particular sense of connectedness I felt in that moment, instead, is the centrepiece.
Now, studying abroad in Washington, D.C., I find myself redefining my sense of home. After my not-quite break-up, my friends simultaneously lamented me for leaving them to study abroad and celebrated me for getting away from London – the sacrificial lamb of my relationship troubles.
I love London. Looking at Steffie, I know why she loves New York City, I know why she loves her apartment – I understand the symbol of a protective eggshell, a fragile yet enduring shelter.
“Home is people, not a place,” she told me.
I nodded. I know this sentiment is overused but in a big city like New York or London, where people constantly shuffle through – move, leave, stay but change, don’t change but don’t stay – having a protective eggshell of chosen family to surround yourself with is integral to making a place home. It isn’t 49c itself, or my 11-storey student accommodation that made itself home – it is the gaggle of Steffie’s friends talking loudly around her island counter, it is my friends who I took to the balcony with to talk about the same boy for the 100th time. They are home, and they carry a piece of me with them. Perhaps the reason I cannot relate to her love of New York City is because I have no emotional tether to it – no-one tying me to it.
The question Steffie asks with l’appartement 49c is ‘What is left after something has passed?’. She demonstrates her care and reverence for the skeleton of the passage of time — quite literally, Fly me to the moon and portrait of a first love utilises pork bones, dried flowers and seashells. They are permanent reminders of the impermanence of life, the temporality of action. Other questions I find myself asking while looking through her exhibition are ‘What is important? What matters?’
As I left, she handed me a booklet of her previous exhibition. Tucked in between the sheets is a pork soup recipe. My eyes were drawn back to the café as I laced up my shoes – how her friends laughing around the island table sipping their drinks brought a sense of comfort to an otherwise inanimate space.
Taking the lift back down, I looked over the pork soup recipe. I have never eaten pork in my life, and I do not plan to. But maybe I will make it for my friends, back home.
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson
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