Museum of Lost Heirs

Wei Weng

.

Museum of Lost Heirs is an ongoing project by Chinese artist Wei Weng, exploring unclaimed inheritance and its emotional resonance across generations.

The project originated as The Heir Hunter Office (2024) during a Kyoto residency with curator Yumi Goto, where gallery visitors were invited to “claim” objects left behind by Japan-born individuals who settled and passed away in the United Kingdom.

In March 2026, Museum of Lost Heirs will debut as a solo exhibition at VOID_Melbourne, Australia. For this iteration, Weng has translated messages to lost heirs into the immigrant languages spoken across Victoria— delivering inheritance narratives directly to communities shaped by migration. The installation adapts to

specific neighborhoods and regions, utilizing AI chatbots to calibrate the emotional tenor of an unreachable past for contemporary audiences.

Bridging photography, text, and adaptive technologies, this speculative museum space transforms bureaucratic loss into intimate encounter—connecting present and future generations to the unclaimed stories that remain along the ambitious paths of migration.

About Wei Weng

Born in China and now based in Melbourne, artist Wei Weng is known for using photography, lacquer installations, and speculative text to explore sensory connections between nature and memory. Holding an MFA in Painting from the California College of the Arts (2005), her work has been exhibited in international galleries in cities such as Kyoto, Rome, and Melbourne. She was nominated for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award (2023). Her recent projects Museum of Lost Heirs (2026) and Air Hunter (2024) challenge the liminal and poetic borders of storytelling.