A Legacy Restored, A Light Carried Forward
- MET Glodok
- Jul 16
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 23
This year, we choose to go home. To record, cherish, and honor the neighborhood we belong to and the people who continue to shape it. Restoring Legacy is one of the ways we attempt to do so.
In Glodok, we continuously admire those who carry on their craft with care and consistency, even as the neighborhood shifts around them. Yet we also recognize a pressing reality: time does not wait. Many are growing older, and with them, the stories and practices they hold risk fading away.
When we speak of legacy, we often imagine something tangible—inheritances, buildings, keepsakes. But legacy also lives in memory. In stories recalled and retold, in gestures performed over time, in values passed from one generation to the next.
For the inaugural edition of Restoring Legacy, we revisited the life and work of Mr. Lioe Ren Chen, a respected calligrapher and Glodok local. For decades, his work adorned gates, objects, and different corners of the neighborhood. We were given the opportunity to document his archive of calligraphy, paintings, and photographs, carefully kept by his family since his passing in 2020. In conversation with his daughters and through cleaning his home studio, we came to know him beyond his works. We gathered around his archives and stepped into his home studio, spending time with what he left behind, in the very room where his ink once flowed into form.
In that process, the shape of Restoring Legacy began to reveal itself: not only as documentation, but as a form of care. Not just as memory, but as continuation. From his archive, we chose to reproduce Guāng as a Riso print on xuan paper. Not to replicate the past, but to keep his brush alive. Allowing his light to move forward, quietly and continuously, finding its way into homes, and into the hearts that hold them.
Restoring Legacy is not a one-time remembrance, but an ongoing commitment to the lives and stories that shape Glodok.
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