Recently presented at Tabula Rasa Gallery in London, Homing Syndrome – Mid-Project Showcase introduced an ongoing research-based project centred on the idea of “homing.” Initially developed through research into racing pigeon culture, migration, borders, and systems of return, the exhibition gradually expands into a broader discussion around mobility, identity, and belonging. Supported by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture programme, the project takes racing pigeons – animals that are trained, released, and expected to return “on time” – as its starting point, examining the power structures and psychological mechanisms embedded within forced migration, genetic control, and the idea of “home.”
The project is developed by Macau-born artist Cosmo Wong, whose practice often explores the entanglements between ecology, systems, infrastructure, and human mobility through painting, installation, and moving image. The exhibition is curated by Daisy Di Wang, whose research focuses on diasporic identity, ecofeminism, and cross-cultural curatorial practice.
The exhibition unfolds through layered and fragmented paintings and installations, where repeated imagery, displaced structures, and interrupted spaces produce a constantly shifting visual experience.
Homing Syndrome is a highly characteristic yet promising example of a research-based contemporary art project. One of its strongest aspects lies not only in the works themselves, but also in the clear theoretical structure and spatial language it establishes. Using the racing pigeon system as a point of departure, the project explores themes of forced migration, diaspora, border politics, genetic selection, surveillance, and mobility control. One of the exhibition’s most important gestures is its insistence that racing pigeons are not symbols of freedom or instinct, as they are often imagined to be, but highly controlled beings that are bred, trained, transported, timed, and selected within a systematic structure. In this context, “homing” becomes a direction produced by institutional systems and coded trajectories rather than an instinct. By doing so, the project shifts migration into the realm of infrastructure, systems, and control, situating the work firmly within a contemporary discourse.
What the exhibition ultimately examines is how contemporary systems constantly attempt to optimise movement, while life itself continues to generate error, delay, drift, and displacement. The idea of “surplus distance” is especially significant here. It suggests that systems attempt to eliminate all unnecessary distance in pursuit of efficiency, shortest routes, and precise control, yet life inevitably produces residual gaps that cannot be fully optimised away. These detours, hesitations, and wanderings become spaces that escape control. In this sense, the project recalls Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the control society, while also resonating with Foucauldian structures of surveillance and Paul Virilio’s writings on speed and trajectories.
Missing Horizon is a reflection on the collapse of orientation systems. Within Western visual traditions, the horizon functions as a structure through which the subject locates itself in space and establishes direction. The absence of a horizon therefore suggests a breakdown in navigation itself. In relation to migration, the work implies that “home” can no longer function as a stable point of return, and that diasporic existence often involves a continuous state of drifting and dislocation. Through layered panels and overlapping surfaces, the work further intensifies a spatial experience defined by obstruction, delay, and incomplete visibility. Rather than constructing a stable perspectival space, it produces a fragmented and interrupted one.
Life Finds a Way introduces one of the exhibition’s central tensions: the relationship between systems and life. While many of the other works focus on infrastructures of control, mobility, and regulation, this work shifts attention towards the unpredictable agency of living beings themselves.
The title is particularly significant in relation to the culture of racing pigeons, which forms the conceptual foundation of the project. Racing pigeons are not simply birds in flight, but participants in a highly organised competitive system. They are bred, trained, transported, timed, ranked, and evaluated according to performance. Within this framework, movement becomes measurable, optimised, and governed by human-designed rules. Yet despite these structures, no system can eliminate uncertainty. Weather conditions, environmental changes, instinct, fatigue, deviation, and countless unforeseen factors continue to shape each journey. Against this backdrop, Life Finds a Way points towards the irreducible unpredictability of life itself. Even within highly coded systems of mobility and control, living beings continue to generate unexpected trajectories, detours, and forms of emergence. The work suggests that life can never be entirely reduced to data, optimisation, or management. Its use of moving image is particularly effective in this regard, as film naturally engages with duration, movement, and transformation, allowing the viewer to experience mobility not as a fixed route but as an open and contingent process. Rather than presenting migration as a purely infrastructural condition, the work reminds us that every system ultimately encounters the complexity of life that exceeds its capacity to regulate.
SAIDA reflects on place, memory, and systems of movement. “Saida,” meaning “exit” in Portuguese, is a word still commonly found throughout Macau’s public spaces. Unlike many global cities where local signage has been standardised into the universally recognisable English “Exit,” Macau continues to retain traces of its colonial linguistic history. In this sense, the word functions not only as a practical direction, but also as a lingering marker of cultural memory that persists within the city’s contemporary urban landscape.
Wong appropriates this familiar sign and transforms it into an ambiguous sculptural form. Partially enveloped by fragments resembling green fern-like growths, the word appears suspended between visibility and disappearance. Rather than functioning simply as a directional marker, SAIDA becomes a meditation on departure, belonging, and the persistence of local identity within globalised systems of circulation. The work quietly suggests that movement is never entirely detached from place; even within networks of mobility, traces of history continue to remain embedded in language, infrastructure, and everyday visual culture.
Rooftop Layover offers a reflection on diasporic existence through the notion of transit and temporary suspension. A “layover” is not an arrival, but a temporary suspension: a condition of waiting, transition, and incomplete return. Much of contemporary transnational existence no longer revolves around stable belonging, but around a perpetual state of transit. The “rooftop” is equally important. It is neither fully natural nor entirely artificial, but a threshold space between sky and architecture, nature and infrastructure. This condition of being “in-between” closely reflects the conceptual core of the project. The use of carbon fibre further reinforces the industrial and technological atmosphere of mobility systems. It is not a material associated with warmth or domesticity, but with lightness, precision, aviation, and engineered movement.
Ultimately, Homing Syndrome is not simply a project about pigeons, migration, or mobility systems. What it quietly reveals is a broader contemporary condition: that “home” today is no longer a fixed destination, but an unstable and constantly negotiated state shaped by movement, infrastructure, control, and displacement. Between routes and interruptions, systems and deviations, the exhibition constructs a space where belonging remains perpetually unfinished. Rather than offering resolution, the project leaves viewers suspended within this condition of uncertainty – a state of drifting that increasingly defines contemporary life itself.
Homing Syndrome – Mid-Project Showcase, 16th–17th May 2026 Tabula Rasa Gallery, London
