WoMen
Workshop:
A
collective history restoration
of Chinese women diaspora
With the colonial origins of the Chinese cheap labors ( the coolie system), the history of the Chinese diaspora deems to be both colonial and patriarchal. Starting from sex workers and pawnages of man(1600s) to homemakers, women’s diasporic trajectory was heavily influenced by these two ideologies and shame or unworthy to mention, in which result in historical and present-day narrative marginalization and even narrative femocide.
Women Narrative in Diaspora is a research project aims to break the silence. it intent to explore family archive to restore our women diasporic history collectively.
When there is no grave, We are condemned go on mourning
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive
Most of our family trauma are results from unmourned losses in the non-material days that we did not lived, the loss could be a person, a thing or part of self.
--Yanxian Zhao
This is a hypothesis that I draw by surveying and scrutinizing the generational trauma in my family. My art correspond with this hypothesis, to use art as fantasy structure to find a method to bring the traces of trauma into the present. In this way, by contextualizing those unconscious losses, in order to evacuate the unexplainable confusion, fear, grievance and anger that lingered in me and my family. My art is a process that allows the self to be reborn, and to realize what happened in the past doesn’t need to continue in the present
This is a hypothesis that I draw by surveying and scrutinizing the generational trauma in my family. My art correspond with this hypothesis, to use art as fantasy structure to find a method to bring the traces of trauma into the present. In this way, by contextualizing those unconscious losses, in order to evacuate the unexplainable confusion, fear, grievance and anger that lingered in me and my family. My art is a process that allows the self to be reborn, and to realize what happened in the past doesn’t need to continue in the present