Petrina Ng’s Heirloom Facsimile (2013) is an enlarged embroidered tapestry of an official government document on how to cure cancer through Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a perspective that is often in tension with western medicine. Each digital pixel of the text is skillfully cross-stitched onto large pieces of aida cotton, as though to inscribe and monumentalize the message. According to curator Lauren Fournier: “Ng received the document as a low-resolution scan from her father, who had himself received it as a fax from his mother-in-law, Ng’s grandmother. Throughout this process of sharing information the text degraded, and accumulated the digital noise that Ng represents in her rendering of each pixel as a cross-stitch.” The work consequently reflects on the ways in which alternative medical practices are shared and communicated across generations, cultures, and mediums. Ng adds to this dissonance in dissemination by recreating the documents through textiles and embroidery. By opting for embroidery, she momentarily disrupts the work’s reproducibility, allowing the viewer to meditate on the document and treat it more delicately. Fournier notes the “looming sense of ambivalence” around the integrity and credibility of alternative medical information, which prompts several questions: ‘Is this medical knowledge that we should take seriously? Or, better, how seriously should we take any medical knowledge? What determines the seriousness of medical information? Do we trust our General Practitioner? Our Naturopath? Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner? Osteopath? Psychic? Family friend? Websites like Web MD?’ Heirloom Facsimile resides in a liminal place that complicates the usual recourse to binaries such as Western medicine versus Eastern/alternative medicine.”