2022, United States
Hollow Woman 空心女人
MDF, alternative photo processes, wood glue, string, rod
42 x 48 x 3 inch
Exhibited in 1,000,000 Grit, RISD Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence
A remote memory trapped inside my head that questions my primal being and origin. During a family trip to Guilin when I was a little girl, in the karst cave, I saw dripped stalactites illuminated by the spectrum of artificial rainbow lights, purple, blue, green, and red, alongside new stalactites grew transparency alike with worms that stretched, shrank and dropped to the ground and then retracted. I got separated from my mom. Traversing the stalactitic labyrinth, thin, fragile, and distant echoes from her yelling were the only thing I heard. I tried hard to respond but my voice was unable to reach. If one day, I lost my voice, where shall we meet again?
A part of me could never get out of this anoxic abime. I feel my inner being is a dark land, and I lost my trust in words after I came out of this cave, with certain bodily phenomena: addicted to solitary reading but then being subjected to long-term stammering and temporary aphasia. I realize that there are too many hidden meanings that failed to be surfaced through words, thus transforming the inarticulate and untranslatable into material objects employing either intuitive or mnemonic art practice, has become a long, cyclical, and coiling path to network my 'visual home' and the scattering world.
To fulfill the linguistic void caused by the failure of verbal expression, alternatively, the sculpture speaks for my struggle with the inherent queer body-cum-gesture and its poetic but fragile existence in a breathable space without optical ambiguity as well as conceptual clearness. Making sculptures is a way of physically asserting a vision, and correspondingly body turns into a site of imagination, urgency, aliveness, and potential connection to reflect my power, desire, and fantasy.