heirlooms: an archive of love

Heirlooms: An Archive of Love is an immersive oral history and portrait exhibition that explores memory, inheritance, and belonging within AAPI communities in Georgia. Through intimate conversations between pairs, the project gathers stories shaped by migration, silence, joy, and survival—stories that are often held privately or lost across generations.

At a time when cultural memory is increasingly fragmented by displacement, language barriers, and assimilation, Heirlooms creates space to slow down and listen. The exhibition centers storytelling as a form of care: a way to witness one another into existence, and to affirm that our lives—ordinary, complex, contradictory—are worthy of being remembered.

Blending audio, portrait photography, and art, Heirlooms becomes both an art experience and a living archive that asks: What do we carry from the people who came before us, and what will we leave behind?

Heirlooms was created and curated by Jainey Kim, and the archive is made possible with the support of Asian American Women's Political Initiative (AAWPI), Friday the Gallery, partner artists & collaborators, and the community members who entrusted us with their stories. You can listen to those stories here.