Material: wooden cabinet, clews, stockings, photos, letters, paper scraps...
Size: variable
Exhibition:
- “Fire Within,” Board Art Museum, Michigan, USA 2016
- “New Perception,” Pearl Lam Gallery, Shanghai, China 2015
<Island> was a continue of <one cubic of trust>. From 2014 to 2015, I solicited privately from my lesbian friends, collecting their personal objects that present their experience and their thinking about homosexual identity.
I chose a wooden medicine cabinet (with 16 drawers) to display those objects. Some drawers were open and some other ones were not, indicating the coming out and not coming out. You would be impressed by those varied “gifts”: the California’s marriage certificate of a Chinese lesbian couple, six pieces of white underwear (representing six kinds of emotion) with monologue writing on, a strange false teeth, and a pair of legs stuffed with stockings, some photos and love letters that were tore into pieces, two wool balls tangled together, and an old bra with photos on it...
On the floor, there are dozens of paper balls with interviews about these lesbians. Visitors could pick up those paper and read it, and then bring them home or just throw it back. They are also welcomed to put their own thoughts in it. The way of displaying thoughts of different groups of people brought the interactions between the public and the LGBT group. For me, those paper balls were more of the sea, surrounding the wooden cabinet. While the cabinet was like an island floating above the information sea.
The two artworks at the “New Conception” exhibition were quite different. <Imprisonment> was simple and showed the inner world, while <Island> was complicated and full of information. The former was philosophical, expressing my own feelings about female liberation; the latter was more like a social research, displaying the covert intimate relationship in public, aiming to promote the legalization of gay marriage in China. Overall, both works are about the pursuit of freedom.