CREEPY: This is part of Kaili Chuns installation at the Wing, Janus, a roomful of doubly locked steel cages.
CREEPY: This is part of Kaili Chun's installation at the Wing, Janus, a roomful of doubly locked steel cages. Images JG

Turn a corner and suddenly you're in the center of a miniature prison, with cells around you on all sides in the form of naked steel cages mounted on the walls. Keys hang on heavy metal chains from each cage. The light from above feels stark and institutional, making it so that the cages and chains cast dark shadows on the walls. You're standing there, wondering what to do.

Turn to the wall label for rescue.

This is Kaili Chun's contribution to the Wing Luke Museum's new exhibition Constructs: Installations by Asian Pacific American Women Artists, it says. You're invited to unlock the cages, and the speakers inside the cages will start to play sounds if you do.

Grab the keys.
Grab the keys.

Each of the cages has two locks, not one. There's a lock on the outside of the cage, and a lock on the inside. The sounds inside will not be released unless both locks are undone.

"We find ourselves either locked in by others"—from the outside—"or we become complicit in that system, and we assimilate," Chun said. She spoke by phone from her native Honololu, where "we look at [being part of the United States] as almost an American occupation of our homeland."

The specific "system" Chun was referring to is the system of white domination over native cultures. Her doubly locked cages also resonate for all kinds of interior experience pressed upon by exterior forces.

"Do you put yourself inside of the cell? Sometimes it's safer in the cell," Chun said. "There's only some of the larger world that we can deal with."

There are two locks on each cage, one on the outside, and one on the inside. How are you locked up, and how do you lock yourself up?
There are two locks on each cage, one on the outside, and one on the inside. How are you locked up, and how do you lock yourself up?

Chun, a longtime student of architecture (she got her undergraduate degree in it at Princeton and is studying it again, though she's an artist first, she says), housed all kinds of voices and sounds in her installation's stripped-bare architecture of confinement and release.

There's rain and birdsong, modern machinery and street sounds, traditional and pop music. I heard a woman speaking in one box I opened. Chun told me that's Teresia Teaiwa, reciting her own poetry.

You're the DJ of this architecture. You decide how many boxes to open, how many to close back up. Each one is a surprise, like a chance connection with someone you don't know, or your spouse revealing a secret. You never know what will come out when people are free to speak, and you're listening.