Exploring Space and Experience.
My Ocean is a time based video projected in a living room. It was really important to me that this video was projected in a residential space to mimic a flood in ones home rather than in a gallery space. My Ocean is meant to mimic how the mind can process stress and trauma. Water, an element that is fluid and shapeless, yet so powerful and essential to life itself.
My Ocean (2024) - Projected Video
photo credits: Emma Doing
This installation was my first installation that was partly ready made. While much of my work deals with the One Child Policy at large, this installation specifically deals with my personal story.
“On the Morning of May 15, 2003, a taxi driver from Mei Xi district found a girl under the tree by the gate of the Yue Yang Commercial hall of the railway station. She was wrapped in a jacket and wearing a hat. There was a bottle and half a package of formula and a few diapers along with a note attached to her saying “ My daughter was born on May 15, 2003, hope she could be adopted by a kind person”. After searching for her parents in vain, she was sent to Yue Yang Social Welfare Institute on the same day.”
-Yue Yang Social Welfare Institute, Hunan Province (September 30, 2004)
The Only Words I Have (2024) - screen print on paper, hat, bottle, and formula.
During the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the Chinese government dropped pamphlets from helicopters, urging the protesters to leave the square. There is something incredibly visceral about falling paper, many times in wartime or conflict, pamphlets are used or dropped on people. In this piece I screen printed pamphlets the statistics of the One Child Policy and hung them with fishing line to make it reminiscent of the falling pamphlets used in the past.
What is the worth of a girl? (2024) - screen print on paper, fishing line.