胡说八道

It is a common Chinese American experience to struggle with constructing identity at the intersection of vastly different cultural histories, to write ourselves into existence rather than float on the periphery of cultural narratives. In this context, how do we record that felt experience, where something exists to make a record of, but there is no vocabulary to record it in?

胡说八道 is a performance in which I create ink marks on my own body and transfer them onto a paper-mache sculpture. Through using my body as both a tool and a canvas, I assert my autonomy in shaping my own existence. Yet at the same time, by using my body as a canvas, I create an asemic language that resists translation yet insists on presence, embracing a lack of easy labels.

Paper-mâché itself is made through a process of destruction and reconstruction, echoing the fragmented nature of identity formation. As a material, it holds the nonsensical, the layered, and the in-between, becoming an analogy for the act of piecing together a self from scattered, inherited, and felt parts.