Artist Statement
There exists two tracks of time in China: first track, the five thousand years of imperial history, used for dinner chitchat, television programs and political mileage; second track rolls from 1979, year one of economic reforms, privatization and capitalism. When asked for lessons from the French Revolution, Mao replied, “Its far too early to say.”
Postcard pictures of Beijing from 1989: idealistic youths and tank conveyors. Twenty years later: market shares and flickering lights. Vertical growths and horizontal displacements in contemporary China correspond to the collective dreams of American Wonderland circa 1959, a white hole to the black end of the worlds.
Process Statement
Since my birth in 1979, I lived between American-dreamt malls and American-occupied Formosa, existing as a moth with severed antennae, left to chance fluttering slight above Pacific Ocean waves.
My work reenacts the displacement of my grandparents from China to Taiwan after the war in 1949. My imaginary war of cracks, collapses and sense reconfiguration: in 2008, the Sichuan earthquake and Beijing Olympics as metaphor of the dead, dispossessed and burnt, makeshift shelters in towns half intact, alongside falling boulders and bulldozers.