Sim Chi Yin is a research based artist that works with photography, moving image, archival interventions and text-based performance. For the series The Suitcase is a Little Bit Rotten, shown here at the Art Basel Hong Kong, the artist returns to her own roots and strats exploring her own family history. Sim Chi Yin uses the long-concealed history of her paternal grandfather as a departure point to speculate around trans-generational memory and inheritance. A left-wing journalist and activist in the anti-colonial war in British Malaya, he was deported by the British in 1949 to his ancestral village in China, where he was executed by the nationalist Kuomintang shortly before the Communists seized power. Sim rescues this history from the oblivion to which her family’s silence had destined it, so that she can pass it on to her young son, who bears his great-grandfather’s name. In a two-channel video installation, the artist patches together traces of her grandfather’s possible last journey from Malaya, and also evokes the place where he began life and ended it: China. The film’s motif of a tunnel can also be understood as a conjuring of time travel. Sim’s interventions into Magic Lantern slides from the 1900s depicting Southeast Asia are also a form of time travel in the archives.