Drawn in Captivity | Exhibition Opening
Line up: Yuxuan Cui

 Opening: Friday 12 June, 17:00-21:00
Exhibition dates: 13-21 June, everyday, 13:00-19:00

Part of the airWG series

Drawn in Captivity by Yuxuan Cui is an ongoing research-based art project tracing the wartime experience of Dutch Major General H.J.D. de Fremery, who was held as a prisoner of war by Japanese forces during the Pacific War and transferred from Southeast Asia to Manchuria (present-day Northeast China).

The project emerged from a sketchbook secretly drawn by de Fremery while interned in a POW camp in Manchuria. The drawings document forced labour, camp spaces, and routes of displacement between 1942 and 1945, spanning Java, Sumatra, Singapore, colonial Taiwan, Manchuria and Philippines. The artist encountered these images by chance in Image Bank WW2—a discovery that revealed Cheng Chia Tun, a railway town near her hometown in Jilin, China, as an overlooked node in a global wartime network.

Developed as part of the airWG residency programme and presented in its current phase at puntWG, the project unfolds as an open research site, bringing together dual-channel video, archival materials, and photographic works developed through a long-term investigation along de Fremery's transfer route. Moving between archives, museums, former POW camp sites, ports, and post-military landscapes, the artist follows the traces, gaps, and contradictions that persist across documents, sites, and memory.  

By bringing together materials dispersed across countries, institutions, languages and regimes of remembrance, the project asks how histories of war, colonialism and forced displacement continue to inhabit landscapes, infrastructure and commemorative practices. 

The project is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, CBK Rotterdam and the One-Way Street Foundation.