2025,
Jingdezhen, China
I imagine it placed in a bright, open room 我想象它置身于一间敞亮的房间
Glass, nine years compulsory education textbook, steel
120cm x 120cm x 120cm
Exhibited in Borders in Flux “Migratory Bird Project” International art exhibition, Qiumo Art Gallery, China
This project began with a return. Living between the U.S., the U.K., and China in the past decade, I have been moving constantly and
find myself struggling with each relocation. After years of living abroad, I came back to China.
I thought I missed Shenzhen, but upon returning, I was struck by acute gastroenteritis. The smell of stinky tofu and roadside fried food made me want to vomit. Those once-familiar things had become strange. I had forgotten that Shenzhen has always been heavily corroded by southern humidity; the buildings and sky cloaked in gray, and the road construction reminded me of Communist Party propaganda posters:" Green mountains and clear waters are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver," accompanied by colorful ink trees. Everything had a familiar warmth, yet with a pervasive melancholy. My body' s allergies and maladaptation have left me inexplicably weary and depressed. Metal rusts. Buildings and walls are stained. The sky and the air are filled with dust and smog. It' s not that I dislike it, but I feel an overwhelming heaviness and blockage here. I long to hide in the night. To become air.
I also forgot the facts about "home" - the life under the discipline of others. The eternal decor and habits at home bind my body. I felt a sharp, almost irrational urge to burn the things that had long gathered dust. Among them were four boxes of textbooks from my nine years of compulsory education—materials that had slipped out of time. These were the textbooks and study materials my brother and I used from elementary through high school, shaped entirely by China's high-pressure exam-oriented education system. It was a system built not to cultivate individuality, but to suppress it, replacing uncertainty with standardized answers and conformity. I began to ask: What does that education mean to me now? How have those rigid contents shaped the way I think, speak, or exist in the world?
These objects, once filled with certainty and instruction, now felt hollow and inert, waiting to be reconfigured. I wondered whether they could be transformed into something else—not through meaning, but through material memory.
At the Taoxichuan Glass Art Studio in Jingdezhen, I was given the opportunity to bring this question into form. Through the techniques of hot slumping and kiln forming, I placed the textbook covers between two sheets of molten glass. The gesture was a violent act. Paper, left to fire, burns in chaos. Yet, the glass withdrew oxygen from the flame, suspending the paper mid-combustion. What emerged was entrapment and suffocation. A trace fixed in time. A breath held within transparency.
The resulting installation takes the form of a wall assembled from glass boxes. Some sections are clear, others opaque. Between the layers lie two-dimensional remnants of the textbooks, now carbonized, semi-transparent, and reshaped by heat. Some fragments are arranged into faint, broken text. You can see through the wall, yet it remains heavy with residue—bearing the imprint of what once defined how I thought, spoke, and conformed. In sunlight, the wall casts intricate shadows.
This installation echoes on loss and recovery, the process of discarding and discovering. These textbook covers were once authoritative cultural material. I chose to erase them, preserve their remains, and transform them into visual evidence of their disappearance. This is my way of finding in losing, of reclaiming material not for what it said, but for what it now holds: silence, fragility, suspended breath. The work lives in the space between archive and erasure, language and aphasia, object and disappearance. It is a scavenger act: to sift through what remains of the past—and to burn it into glass.
This installation echoes on loss and recovery, the process of discarding and discovering. These textbook covers were once authoritative cultural material. I chose to erase them, preserve their remains, and transform them into visual evidence of their disappearance. This is my way of finding in losing, of reclaiming material not for what it said, but for what it now holds: silence, fragility, suspended breath. The work lives in the space between archive and erasure, language and aphasia, object and disappearance. It is a scavenger act: to sift through what remains of the past—and to burn it into glass.