As Brubey Hu and I are friends, collaborators, painters, and alumni of Zalucky Contemporary (a gallery in Toronto), I’m privy to the symbols, scenes, and impulses that permeated through her recent exhibition, Islands of Departure 离别之屿. Hosted by Zalucky in the spring of this year, Hu’s colourful diptychs sprawled characters and objects (both familiar and unfamiliar) across the canvas and onto the walls of the gallery. The space between each pair of paintings pulsed with a bright fluorescence; its glow reminiscent of how the winter snow outside looked before it began to melt.  The uncanny nature of the work led me to seek more sense of it through a myriad of written formats: Experimental text? An interview? A response? A formal review? With pointed obfuscation, Hu’s purposeful deconstruction of place, identity, and memory asks the onlooker to call upon their own index of memory. This desire for connection and collective reading rendered the evaluative form of a review, or writing toward a complete encapsulation of the show, irrelevant. My inclination isn’t about liking the show or not liking the show, but instead, the porousness of understanding the show itself. How could value judgements be placed if one’s own reading of the work is of cumulative importance too?