Ysabelle Cheung’s debut collection of stories asks what makes us human
Hong-Kong based writer and gallerist Ysabelle Cheung’s debut collection gathers ten stories about speculative futures that circle themes of inherited ritual, ecological unease, as well as the diasporic condition and the unpredictability of the human body. What binds them is an atmosphere of dislocation, of both geography and time: located in Hong Kong and North America, each presents a present that is constantly haunted by the past.
Several employ the second-person ‘you’, drawing the reader directly into their shifting realities. In one, a choose-your-own-adventure narrative begins with you waking to discover that every book in your flat has vanished. From there the story takes circuitous paths – through arcades, diners or doctors’ surgeries – sometimes ending in death, sometimes in a quiet instruction to begin again. One line recurs across these fractured timelines: ‘We live on top of ghosts’.
Hauntings are everywhere in the collection, through Cantonese superstitions as well as the lingering weight of familial duty, migration and half-remembered lives. In the story ‘Find Your Spirit’, Cheung riffs on Apple’s ‘Find My Friends’ software: after sending away a vial of blood, a woman downloads an app that allows her to track the ghost of her dead twin sister as she drifts through familiar sites across Hong Kong. Food anchors these spectral themes to the body. Characters grieve over bowls of instant ramen or celebrate successfully selling their facial features by buying ingredients they once could not afford. Yet the body that consumes is also something that can be consumed. Several stories imagine technologies that enable humans to cannibalise others – and themselves – through industries built on extraction. A story about hyperrealistic humanoid robots, created to provide a range of services and whose developing personalities go unnoticed by their creators and owners, sits alongside the collection’s titular tale about new cosmetic surgeries that splice together facial features sourced disproportionately from women of colour or those of lower economic status. What emerges is less a meditation on what it means to be human than on what makes us human: the fragile networks of hunger, memory and care that bind the living to the ghosts they carry
Patchwork Dolls by Ysabelle Cheung. Blair, $18.95 (softcover)
From the Spring 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
