Where Words Fail Us
Where Words Fail Us
This exhibition, curated by Jessica Chen, explores the bonds within our family; these photographs depict the unspoken connections and the many ways we show love for each other without words.
Family bonds are unique within each family's dynamic. There are times when we cannot put the depth of our feelings into words - often a generational fear of showing vulnerability keeps us from bearing our emotions fully. We must find other ways to express the love we have for each other. This exhibition is a visual expression documenting the many ways love is conveyed without words. Connection is found in small acts of service, a reassuring touch, quiet presence, or a moment of silence. Love finds a way, where words fail us.
Featuring work by Ngân Vũ, Senny Mau, Laura Ming Wong, Stella Kalaw and Jessica Chen
Thank you to the East Bay Asian Local Development Center, East Bay Photo Collective, Underdog Film Lab, and Uproar Design and Print for supporting this exhibition. Thank you to Liyuan Zhang and Mireille Mariansky for providing translations for this exhibition.
On display at the Asian Resource Center Gallery (310 8th St. Oakland, CA 94607) from February through June 2026
Ngân Vũ
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I left Sài Gòn at age two, before I could form memories of a motherland. My family rebuilt their lives in California carrying fragments of Việt Nam through language, food, and rituals. Through my art, I explore this liminal space, the weight of inherited trauma from a war I didn't live through, the duality of displacement and yearning for belonging.
In our Vietnamese immigrant home, love was seldom expressed through words, but rather through the language of food as care. I've grown to recognize the familiar scenes from my childhood of the matriarchs of my lineage cooking in the kitchen as profound gestures of love. The fridge and shelves filled with familiar flavors represented more than mere ingredients. The food was a connection to our roots, evoking a longing for the homeland that my family left behind. Through storytelling, I strive to weave together the threads my ancestors left behind to carry forward their love and rich legacy.
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Ngân Vũ (she/her) is a Sài Gòn born, Bay Area raised visual artist, community weaver and storyteller, exploring the depths of identity, culture, and vulnerability in her work. As a 1½ generation daughter of the Vietnamese diaspora, she draws inspiration from her vibrant community and ancestral lineage. Ngân's creative practice harnesses the transformative power of personal storytelling to cultivate collective intergenerational healing within our shared narratives. Her work aims to evoke empathy and foster a heart-centered tenderness in human connection.
Senny Mau
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Love Language celebrates my family and my heritage as an American-born Chinese (ABC). I am unlearning my internalized racism and celebrating the hardship that my family have faced since immigrating to a country that never truly accepts them.
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Senny Mau, 缪倩玲 (b. 1992, CA) is an artist and curator based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Mau expresses herself through whatever mediums best articulate her concepts, including photography, oil painting, mixed media, installations, and curation. Her work mostly focuses on identity dysphoria, growth, and life experiences.
Laura Ming Wong
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I was fortunate to have been raised by a mother who tried not to saddle me with her fears or expectations. Recognizing my interest in documentary photography, she suggested: “you should do a photo series of this.” “This” was her life during stage 4 lung cancer.
The illness showed no warning signs. My parents had just moved from the midwest to start a life near me and other family members in California. They were still in the process of unpacking their new home and making retirement plans. There was so much expectation to make new memories - but not ones like these. In January 2018, my mother’s terminal diagnosis was in motion faster than my thoughts, emotions, or words could formulate. So I agreed with her, and took these photos that were never meant to be seen.
As I write this in January 2026, it has been nearly eight years since my mother passed, and just as long to understand why she, an intensely private and proud person, would invite me to photograph her most vulnerable moments. It was one of her final expressions of love: to pull me through a long and enduring grieving process; to encourage a deeper, more personal photographic practice; to help me help myself when words, medicine, and bodies fail us.
As much as death is about the deceased, it is also about the ones who loved them the most. These photos are a record of my family's love for one another as we stayed present for my mother, fumbled through the darkness of her loss, and eventually made space for the life that continued, together.
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Laura Ming Wong (Oakland, CA, USA) is a documentary photographer, passionate about human- and environment-centric projects that mobilize her core strengths of observation, adaptability, and connection.
Her start in photography buoyed in the wake of the Great Recession, as political protests roiled through the San Francisco Bay Area. Her coverage of these events led her to The Oakland Post, the largest African-American weekly newspaper in Northern California, followed by other local lifestyle and academic publications. From 2012 to 2017, she ventured across police lines, into the homes of well-heeled entrepreneurs, ringside at sold-out boxing arenas, kitchens of buzzy restaurants, and everyday spaces in-between. She has traveled several times to Cuba, Mexico, Morocco, and Nicaragua, developing photo series based on these trips.
Laura is a mother to strong-willed twin girls who evolve her observation and connection skills in new ways. Outside of photography, she works as an environmental technology project and people manager.
Stella Kalaw
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These photographs explore intimacy and distance within the shifting geography of family—close-knit yet scattered. Living across three continents, we gather only once or twice a year.
The black and white images (2000-2005) are part of a photographic essay that follows my niece Marina, beginning three weeks after she suffered a stroke at birth. These images preserve moments of tenderness as our family gathered together, moments that might otherwise have dissolved into memory.
The color portraits take a different approach: individual sittings made at different times, each one a brief point of connection that marks time's passage. Beyond immediate family, these photographs extend to my uncle and aunt, to friends, to chosen family—relationships not bound by blood but by something equally sustaining.
Together, these photographs ask what holds us together when proximity cannot.
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Stella Kalaw is a photographer born and raised in Manila, Philippines. She earned a BA in Communication Arts at De La Salle University, Manila, and her BA in Professional Photography at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California.
Stella's photographs explore memory and place through visual narrative. Her fine art work has been exhibited at the Singapore International Photography Festival, The Ayala Museum in Manila, Kala Art Gallery in Berkeley, and in group exhibitions curated by Jessica Chen including The Stories We Tell (2024, Oakland Photo Workshop Gallery) and When Words Fail Us (2026, Asian Resource Center). The Banco Sentral ng Pilipinas (Central Bank of the Philippines) and En Foco in the Bronx, New York, have acquired her photographs for their permanent collections.
Her editorial portrait work has been featured in the New York Times and magazines such as Gastronomica and Wine Enthusiast.
She is based in Emeryville, California.
Jessica Chen
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Where Words Fail Us is an exhibition that explores the connections, bonds and relationship dynamics we share with the people closest to us; our family.
In many Asian families and households, the words “I Love You” are in some cases rarely or never uttered between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, even between siblings for an entire lifetime. Why do so many of us find it so difficult to express how we feel for one another? What can we do to show we care and feel love for each other? What does love and connection look like within your family dynamics? Are they acts of service rooted in tradition, moments of silence, quiet reflection, or mere presence in proximity?
The idea of showing up as “strong” is more accepted and celebrated, whereas showing emotional vulnerability is imagined as a sign of weakness; something we avoid or fear. These photographers show us the many ways love is expressed where words fail us. -
Jessica Chen is a documentarian, street photographer and curator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A native Californian, Chen was born in San Francisco and grew up in Pacifica, a coastal beach town along the Pacific Coast Highway.
Early in her career, Chen worked many jobs covering a wide spectrum of creative fields. For over a decade, she worked as an illustrator, graphic designer and web designer for notable artists, publications and art institutions. After interning at Maysles Film in Harlem, New York, and working alongside Albert Maysles and his family, She went on to work for post production studios contributing to award winning social documentary films, such as Remnants of a War (2008) and My Perestroika (2010). She continued to work in documentary film in various roles for many years before returning to photography professionally. You can find Chen in her element photographing the streets, documenting daily life, social rumblings and everyday observations.
Chen earned a B.S. in Environmental Design with an emphasis in Visual Communication and a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Davis. She went on to earn an M.F.A in Design and Technology with an emphasis in Narrative and Documentary Film from Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York City. Chen serves on the board of directors of the East Bay Photo Collective (EBPCO), is a member of the Los Angeles Center for Photography (LACP) and Women In Street (WiS), an international group of women street photographers.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the East Bay Asian Local Development Center, East Bay Photo Collective, Underdog Film Lab, and Uproar Design and Print for supporting this exhibition.
About the Asian Resource Center Gallery
Oakland Photo Workshop has been given the opportunity to curate 2 exhibitions for the Asian Resource Center, located at 310 8th St. Oakland, CA 94607.
For this exhibition, we wanted to highlight Asian American, female artists with connections to the East Bay Asian American Community.
This exhibition is on view on the first floor of the Asian Resource Center. You may enter through the Asian Resource Center weekdays from 9-5p or through Oakland Photo Workshop Fridays and Saturdays 12-6p and Sundays 12-3p.
Thank you to the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation for making this exhibition possible.
EBALDC’s mission is to emphasize our historic and continuing commitment to Asian and Pacific Islander communities, EBALDC works with and for all the diverse populations of the East Bay to build healthy, vibrant and safe neighborhoods through community development.
EBPCO’s mission is to provide facilities, education, inspiration, and community to East Bay photographers, including those who are under-served or lack access to a creative community. Our community gallery space, Oakland Photo Workshop, is located at 312 8th St, Oakland, CA 94607. OPW’s hours are Fridays and Saturdays from 12-6pm and Sundays 12-3pm.