Graphic Medicine

Methods

Topics

Publishing

In doing this work, the figure of ghost has come into the project, guiding me to new places.

I’ve always had this cruel inner voice, however lately, my relationship to it has changed.

I’ve known for a while that it was some variant of my father’s voice that I internalised, another friend talked about it as the child that believed my dad, in any case it is quite cruel.

During the process of storytelling, I began to see potential in this figure to help me uncover the past. That this figure could in fact assist in my attempts at 

 and trace the memories of the intergenerationl self.

So by doing this, I see this ghost as a task master, reminding that the work of intergenerational mending is still needed.

And by writing through the ghost, writing as the ghost, I attempt to embody ghostwriting.

It is my take on the secular and earthly definitions of ‘ghostwriting’, the practice of writing on behalf of another writer whereby the real author’s identity is obscured. Although it references this, I also mean to speak about my practice of writing to a ghost, to the ghost of my intergenerational wounding – Ursula. By writing to Ursula (and sometimes as Ursula herself ), I’m attempting to embody the perspectives of my lineage so as to empathise and come closer to understanding.

Ghostwriting

How did the expression ‘navel-gazing’ evolve to mean self-indulgent introspection, where it once meant a form of contemplation about the cosmos through the navel? The term ‘navel-gazing’ derives from the Ancient Greek word, omphaloskepsis, the practice of meditation by connecting to the cosmos through gazing around the umbilical region.

A beautiful image is conjured; one can understand the larger universe through the universe of the body. To understand the vast and infinitely mysterious, we begin by peering at and through another vast and infinitely mysterious micro-universe that is our bodies. To me, it places the navel as the very gateway and portal to the macro and micro, smack bang in the middle of our belly. The umbilical cord, so reminiscent of a telephone cord, and so vibrantly blue too, is the fleshy tunnel into the cosmos beyond our membrane. The false illusion is that this skin separates. It in fact connects us ­– the cord enables telecommunication to forces we have been blinded by. The question is how did the access to the cosmos get cut? I feel Trinh T. Minh-ha, American-Vietnamese filmmaker and writer, partially answers this question.

“There is not much, in the kind of education we receive here in the West, that emphasizes or even recognizes the importance of constantly having contact with what is actually within ourselves, or of understanding a structure from within ourselves out. The tendency is always to relate to a situation or to an object as if it is only outside of oneself. Whereas elsewhere, in Vietnam, or in other Asian and African cultures for example, one often learns to ‘know the world inwardly,’ so that the deeper we go into ourselves, the wider we go into society.”

This is further unpacked by her differentiation between navel-gazing and navel erasing to talk about different ways of using the “I” position. She uses these terms to describe how ‘Third World’ feminist writers struggle to find a balance between inscribing their experiences to create visibility of their “kind” without indulging in “naïve whining” and remaining silent, which is itself a form of annihilation for perspectives that are already on the margins. Allow me to think through these vivid terms within my context. I would make a distinction between the “I” that takes up space (navel-gazing) and an “I” that relates to other “I’s” as a way to share space, which I call navel expanding. To completely remove the “I” of Western “objective” academia is to pretend to not take space while very much doing so. This is a form of feigned or institutional navel erasing. If marginalised folk often experience navel erasing when their “I’s” are neglected or not cared for, the navel expanding position might be understood as the feminist practice of amplifying other voices. I attribute bell hooks, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Uzma Rizvi, south Indian sociologist, and archaeologist, for encouraging me and teaching me navel expanding practices, ones that might be able to mend practices of navel-gazing.

Navel expanding practices, as the image evokes, begins with an introspection and interrogation of the body and expands outwardly that oscillates and connects the inner body to the wider body. In this way, my research with my mother is such a practice. I began this journey by reflecting upon my past, and just as my umbilical cord connects me to my mother and hers to her mother, I am tracing the lineages of my navel, hoping to uncover the genealogy of my ancestral wounding.

In my research into intergenerational trauma in 2nd generation Chinese diaspora, I learned of a Chinese concept called 

. It means ‘great self’ where the self is understood to include one’s family and is inherited from one’s ancestors (Bedford & Hwang, 2003). I feel that navel expanding and 

 are related in this sense, as both see the self as not contained to an individual or even one lifetime, but speaks of an ‘intergenerational self’.

In this regard, the practice of navel expanding for me is the process of researching my own embodied knowledges in light of my family's history to explore the larger context of China in the 20th century during a tumultuous time of political, cultural, and social revolution which would eventually lead a generation to migrate to countries in the global north; Australia, Canada, US, and many countries on the European continent.

Navel expanding

Our bodies are the text that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation. Katie Cannon

I would like to start at a place where I had ignored for the longest part of my life, my body – a place that stored the wounded past that I was painfully fleeing from. A place that felt alien in the global north where my yellow skin, almond eyes and short legs paled against the dominant bodies that had blonde hair, blue eyes and pale skin. A place where it couldn’t speak about its own ineffable invisibility. A place where my eyes were filtered by the reality of those with blue eyes, the dominant ones who claimed the ‘universal’.

In 2018, I had the honour of teaching in the Cultural Diversity Minor at Wdka alongside my dear colleague and friend, Teana Boston-Mammah. The thematic focus of the course was ‘Embodied Knowledge(s)’, an understanding “that without the bodily, we would not be able to organize ourselves in our environment: we would not know where/what we are, what/how we are learning or how we can communicate about our feelings, experiences and modes of being.”

From a feminist and marginalised perspective, the act of reclaiming the body was a resistance towards rational abstraction within the academy as institutional legacies of Enlightenment thinking. The traumatic impact that this has left is an instituted dissociation, one that sees the objective gaze, the erasure of situated, embodied and enmeshed knowledges as ‘neutral’, and thereby attaining the status of authoritative and universal. To begin unpacking why certain values since the Enlightenment period have been prioritised over others, bell hooks’ term “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy”, may be useful here. It describes a reality of interlocking oppressive structures that have reorganised our world view to uphold the belief in false divisions and hierarchy between head/heart, male/female, male/other, science/intuition, rational/emotional, art/design, design/craft, Western/non-Western, public/private and abstraction/lived experience. As with many other institutions, art and design educational institutions have perpetuated these binaries, keeping the top denominations as superior institutionalised forms of knowledge while denigrating the bottom denominations as unofficial and inferior, as visualised here in this image of ruptured and false binaries. For me this path of mending involved the processes of stitching back together false divisions, unlearning institutionalised conditioning and devaluing Eurocentric hierarchies. And all of that started first by understanding the world where the senses begin – that is in our bodies – by interrogating how the body organises our knowing, feeling and being, and by extension how that shapes our understanding of the way we gaze on our own bodies and those of others.

The path back to my body has not been a wholesome image of wellbeing, one in which you might envision a white lady doing yoga or meditation against the backdrop of a crisp morning sunrise. In fact, it has been at times entirely boring, crippling, and lonesome. But increasingly over the years, I’ve also discovered vast new terrains in a house that I previously thought was much smaller. Building upon ‘Embodied Knowledge(s)’, Rob Baum’s notion of the body as archive – ‘a container of emotion, sensation, and memory, including trauma and its effects’, has been a really useful frame to understand the archive not necessarily confined to an architectural edifice or institutional machine, but rather as a humanly embodied 

 for memory. Set forward by a desire to unearth my body as archive, my inquiry is driven by questions about what my body is aware of that I’m not, about the darkness it hides from me to protect me, and whether I might habour the stories and traumatic memories of my ancestors deep within my RNA, the messenger-interpreter of DNA genes. I am interested in traumatic memory and how trauma alters the physical and psychic body. I’m also interested in the transmission of traumatic memory onto the body, and through RNA imprints those past experiences onto the present, like a haunted re-enactment, ever-present yet intangible. (dear Ursula, spectral publishing)

I also see bodies as repositories of collective knowledge. Similar to Baum’s notion of body as archive, building upon Edward Said, Gloria Wekker writes about the notion of the ‘cultural archive’ not necessarily located in a physical place, but rather located within ‘repositories of memories’ with regard to how colonial influence have affected and structured the ways in which a culture views race. She writes that it is located ‘in the heads and hearts of people […], but its content is also silently cemented in policies, in organizational rules, in popular and sexual cultures, and in commonsense everyday knowledge, and all of this is based on four hundred years of imperial rule’. The cultural archive is the ‘repository of (colonial) memory and knowledge tainted by the colonial’. (Shapeshifty)

More literally, I have to recall the oral traditions of West Africa, whereby the storyteller and musician of the tribe, known as a griot is a living repository of history and culture. The griot is a powerful and important figure that passes the memories of one generation to the next. And if one departs this life, it is as if a library burns. Fahrenheit 451, a book written by Ray Bradbury in 1953 at the height of the McCarthy era in the US, paints a dystopian story of a society that oppresses its people by erasing its past through the burning of books. People who resist live in hiding on the fringes of the community and by memorising the books that were destroyed, become human archives.

I’m also interested to explore craft as intergenerational practices of embodied heirlooms. They are not treasures of the material kind, but valued objects of an immaterial nature; skills, trades, techniques, embodied knowledges.

Navel expanding practices is the understanding of the larger universe through the universe of the body. To understand the vast and infinitely mysterious, we begin by peering at and through another vast and infinitely mysterious micro universe that is our bodies. To me, it places the navel as the very gateway and portal to the macro and micro, smack bang in the middle of our belly. This hole, so reminiscent of a telephone cord, so vibrantly blue, is the fleshy tunnel into the cosmos beyond our skin. The false illusion is that this skin separates. In fact, it connects us – the cord enables telecommunication to forces we have been blinded by. Navel expanding is what connects body as archive to body as cultural archive, personal to collective, familial to the cultural. For more see navel expanding

Embodied knowledges means to me a step towards exploring the 

body as a simultaneous site of personal and collective knowledge(s)

through navel expanding practices that have been historically othered by Western institutions of knowledge production. My next question is how to mark, record and document knowledges of the body, and how does textile as second skin, offer itself as a magical medium in ensuring its visibility and circulation?

on our sleeves, patchwork of cotton veins.

of an elephant. Snail’s shell. Ram’s horn.

When the words burn, all that’s left is ash.

I’ve always felt that textile had the capacity for carrying intimate stories, biography, memory and its relation to the body because of its close proximity to the material body. Textile can reveal the intimate traces of the body through material and immaterial imprints. For instance, the shape of the garment that traces the bulging belly of a pregnant person, or the memories captured in commemorative quilts. I’m interested to explore what is imprinted on the body, how that is expressed. And how textile as second skin, reveal the imprints of the body. I’m thinking about bodies as text and consequently the relationship between text and textile.

Some years ago while digging through a typography book I came across a piece of fascinating etymology which would be the seed in developing this framework. I was delighted that the root word for text and textile comes from the Latin word ‘texture’ which means to weave. Many expressions about writing come from the rich world of cloth making. This connection can also be understood as the connection between immaterial and material culture. Interconnected, entangled, material, and immaterial: text and textile, like their shared linguistic root, textere, are woven together. To weave, as a metaphor, also describes social networks as well as interpersonal relationships, likewise social interaction and intergenerational exchange. The expression ‘the fabric of life’ is an interconnected affair. Research, like story telling is weaving too, whereby lines of thought are interwoven together forming a patchwork of sorts.

Textile as documentary, record keeping, storytelling

In thinking about textile’s documentary role, I’m reminded of the quipu, a system of recordkeeping and communication using knotted-cord developed by Andean people around 3000BCE. These “‘talking knots’ were used as an embodied mnemonic device for recordkeeping, as touching the cords triggered the recall of information in a somatic or tactile form of reading, a literal pivot between text and textile.” The quipu plays a central place in the practice of Chilean poet and artist, Celina Vicuna, where she has explored fiber as a kind of line that mutates into a form of writing. As an object that was precolonial carrying ancient indigenous knowledge however severed by colonial regimes, the themes addressed in her work centers around the erasure and inaccessibility of knowledge as much as it does the containment of it. An embodied language from an ancient past summons us to a remembered or imagined body.

(Text)ile can simultaneously reveal and hide. What are the aesthetics and ethics of invisibility; hiding and obscuring? In contrast, what are the aesthetics and ethics of visibility; confessing and disclosing? One can see self-publishing as a gesture of making inner worlds visible, there’s an element of reflection and confession – the act of making it known to an audience, real or imagined, secular or divine. In thinking about textile as an autobiographical account, I’m reminded of Agnes Richter’s embroidered ‘diary’ jacket. In 1895, 51-year-old German seamstress was admitted to the Hubertusberg Psychiatric Institution where she would spend the rest of her life. Embroidered on the outside and on the inside of the jacket, the gesture speaks about the preservation of her own identity within an environment that sought to strip women of their dignity, sanity and sovereignty. Interestingly, it seems that Richter had created the fitted jacket which was designed to trace her asymmetrical body shape – extra material above the right shoulder to accommodate the spinal curvature from which she suffered.The textile became a place to imprint her mind as well as her body, calling us to remember the traces of her, despite the institutional odds against her.

I’m also thinking about the role of textile in subversive documentation. The gruesome Greek myth of Philomela is what comes to mind. Story centers around three characters; Philomela the princess of Athens and her sister Procne, married to King Tereus of Thrace. After Philomela’s powerful brother-in-law rapes her, he imprisons Philomela and cuts out her tongue to silence her from speaking out against him. Censored and voiceless, Philomela weaves the injustices at the hands of Tereus into a tapestry and sends it to her sister. Procne finds out and plots revenge on her husband by killing their son, Itys, and feeding King Tereus their son. The tapestry stands in for Philomela’s voice when her tongue is unable to speak the truth of the crimes committed against her. In weaving, a language that required no ‘tongue’, the tapestry was able to bypass the King’s efforts to silence Philomela.

Another one that comes it mind in which abuse is documented on textiles, is that of the Arpilleras, clandestine textiles on burlap grain bags made by women in Chile that depicted scenes of poverty, human rights violations and resistance in Chile during 1970s and 1980s under Pinochet’s rule. Some of the women who sewed were the ‘mothers, sisters, and wives of the disappeared from various class backgrounds who came together to process shared grief and strategize about how to agitate on behalf of their missing loved ones’ Women came together in church basements and shantytown homes and cut up worn ‘garments of missing children and husbands to embed into the arpilleras their smells and the tactile associations of the bodies that they clothed’. The textile works were primarily made to be exported and were smuggled out of Chile, sold in gift stores in Canada, Europe, and the United States, understood by such consumers primarily as craft testimonies that partook in traditions of folk cultural production while also telling necessary stories about a country in crisis. They circulated to transnational communities through networks of Chilean exiles, feminists, humanitarian aid organizations, progressive church groups, NGOs, global trade gift stores, and the like.

Part of the strategic canniness of these textiles was the fact that they were durable and portable: they could be rolled up, crammed in suitcases, and slid between layers of clothing as they passed through national borders largely undetectable by a regime that heavily censored any oppositional or critical voices. Shipments of arpilleras leaving the country (labeled with false return addresses) were discovered and publicized by police on a few occasions, however, generating negative press about “tapestries of defamation,” anti-governmental “propaganda,” and “subversion”—bringing fear of retribution to the arpilleristas, who were referred to in sarcastic scare quotes as “artisans”.

The subversive nature of textile has been well documented (subversive stitch, fray, cookbook of steganography), a feminized craft, object is considered ‘innocent’ and harmless, is precisely what this instrumentalises for their disobedient purposes.

textile as subversive documentation, documentary, for making visible while hidden in plain sight.

The story-telling role of textile is one that echoes in many cultures and timelines, and the story clothes of the Hmong people is no exception.

Hmong ppl without written language, and passed stories through flower clothes. Hmong refugees created story clothes. textile as a site of storage, transmission, keeping secrets, preserving history, protecting language

A cipher song by Mai Der Vang, textile as coded, flower cloth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmong_writing

I’ve also been interested in the exploring about what the notion of publishing can mean for textile as text. Textile and text circulate amongst bodies, activated and conjured by being worn, read, carried, and exchanged. What are the ways in which textile encounters people? It is both intimate as it is worn close to the body and inside the private sphere, as well as circulating outside in the public sphere. Textile as a medium of publishing has also recently garnered many commercial and artistic efforts as textile printing technology has drastically increasing making it more accessible and cheaper to produce.

I first explored the idea of the body as a site of publishing in the project Thunderclap, a steganographic zine that piggybacks on fashion accessories to publicly distribute the suppressed writings of Chinese anarcho-feminist, He-Yin Zhen (1886-1920). The work camouflages into the streets of Beijing by way of using QR code and Shanzhai fashion, a trend which uses nonsense English on clothing in a context where English is not meant to be read but functions as a decorative element. I was intrigued by how Shanzhai fashion inadvertently rendered bodies into walking billboards, surfaces that have the potential of not only revealing historically invisible biographies hidden in plain sight but also inserting subversive work within public space. For now, I’ll end here at the beginning, where the idea of embodied publishing developed.

Embodied publishing explores ways to document, record, transmit and circulate embodied knowledges by way of text as textile.

Embodied knowledges explores body as archives of personal memory, trauma and history and which inevitably connects to bodies as cultural archives of collective violence, colonization, migration and war. Navel expanding as a gesture/position to trace the cultural through the personal. A family history is a country’s history. By tracing the umbilical cord, a fluid connection not only between personal and collective is made, but also past, present and future. The relationship between body, text and textile is explored for documenting, recording, transmitting and circulating these imprints.

Drawing

Embodied Knowledges

As challenging as it has been for me to receive some of her drawings, they have inadvertently bridged our language barrier. In this poignant way, her images have become our new mode of communication, translating and mending the gaps of language, culture and subjectivity. Within the discourse of art therapy, images offer an effective communication tool in moments when written or verbal language ceases to connect and express. In art therapy, images are used to communicate and heal, and as such they are seen to be medicinal, therapeutic and spiritual. In Western history, art and medicine were once one thing. Why is art therapy divorced from formal art and design education, seen as separate and less valued in the realm of the contemporary art and design world? Serenity Department offers a perfect opportunity to interrogate the aesthetic values set by art and design educational institutional powers that uphold certain legitimizing visual languages as forms of gatekeeping power and work towards mending the gap between art and healing.



Similar to art therapy, Graphic Medicine is an emerging practice that combines life writing, and the medium of comics in therapeutic ways. My mother’s drawings are simultaneously graphic in the sense that they depict her subjectivity in comic ways expressed through drawings and text – as in graphic novel, but also graphic in the sense of explicit – as in graphic violence. This double entendre of the word graphic is insightful in this light, especially when thinking about how to frame and analyze images of violence with care and empathy. Furthermore, how can we shield this explicit pain so that it doesn’t further contaminate and inflict more pain onto others? As fantasy and science fiction comes naturally to my mother, we will explore these genres as a steganographic gesture – a way to encode the content in creating a protective layer.

How can images mend the lines of communication between first and second generation immigrants when the lineages of language have been broken? This is one important question that is at the heart of Serenity Department. Within formal design education in the NL, visual communication is primarily taught to serve industry, government and the arts. However, within Serenity Department, visual communication will be researched in relation to health, healing and mending.

My mother and her aesthetic has played a large role in mending my Westernized perceptions of beauty. She has taught me to look at design through the Chinese value system of Feng shui – a spiritual and auspicious practice of placing objects in space to synchronize the energy of an individual to their environment. While I was in her mending shop, I made her a name card. I designed one for her some years ago and I recall it being clean and minimal – very far away from her bombastically loud taste. So this time around I embraced her style taking cues from the way she decorated her shop which were brimming with Feng shui symbolism for wealth and prosperity. What I learnt of Modernist design was how to communicate, or more precisely schmooze with mere mortals of a specific Western and privileged kind, but what I learnt from the design practiced by my mother was how to communicate with the realms beyond mortal life – design as self-fulfilling prophecy. In the context of visual communication and aesthetics, mending practices can be approached as small steps in the larger cause to decolonize, depatriarchise and demodernise notions of wholeness and brokenness, beauty and ugliness.

the images are the carriers of traumatic memory, of personal and political depression. these are memories of trauma in the body and how it gets passed down. my mother is my history, this is a part of me. these images are epigenetic, they are my intergenerational trauma.

Belonging

We tell stories about ourselves and about each other all the time. Our stories are conspiracy theories, they try to make sense of our loved ones in ways that protect our own vanity, sense of worth, dignity and ego. We trap the other people in our stories of them and they become the characters in the stories we make up for them. Every gesture serves to confirm the conspiracy and is judged and condemned. To a certain degree, stories have cursed and saved my family.

In order for me to break its spell, I must enter into the world of these wicked stories, I must step into that world of my mother. I must not collide with the stories on the outside, I must gently engage with it from the inside. One way to do that is by offering a counter story of the same experience from my perspective. Another important thing is to remember to let go of the stories of my mother inherited from my father and aunt - they also spun skewed stories of her.

However, because i’ve been brought up with conspiracy theories, my stories are naturally conspiratorial. Of course, I construct these stories about my family as my family have made up stories about me. As with any text, the reading will defer from person to person. Wu Zetian, the notorious Tang dynasty empress regnant, conflated myth and history, and legend and fact, to legitimise her reign. This, she called an honest conspiracy. Perhaps my mother would agree with this definition.

My reading of Trinh T. Min-ha’s idea of speaking nearby, instead of speaking for, is to give space for interpretation – to not lock and project my bias as my mother's truth, and objectify it as an intellectual object of study. Story-telling helps me immerse into her terms, world, experiences and language. Story-telling allows me to get a peak into that world and see it as my own construct, without confusing it for a totalising picture of my mother.

Navel Expanding

Conspiracy

together with my assistant (who is born in China, assists me doing translation work, both linguistically and culturally), we’ve done design research into objects that reveal and conceal, or somehow touch upon this boundary of private and public, and of national identity.

One of which are traditional and folk Chinese architectural frames, as visual modes to contextualise and frame my mothers drawings.

For example windows with lattices, otherwise known as leaky windows are used for light and ventilation but also to create distance between scene and audience and also serves to hide and yet reveal certain features of the environment. It is also meant to create a spatial experience: so that the scene changes depending on where you walk.

I’m thinking through this idea of ‘framing’ as in the act of contextualising stories of others and my own, but also to be weary of other violent forms of framing, as in manipulating, extracting or wrongly incriminating.

As an artist/designer/daughter, my role is to listen to her stories, frame and publish.

Framing is to give context of her reality and how she perceives it. But to frame someone is also understood as the manipulation of someone elses actions. To misrepresent someone. I have to be aware of this line.

Frame

Writing and storytelling has become an empathy device – to imagine myself in the shoes and body of someone else. Perhaps it is the old school virtual reality lens. It has been helpful for me to role play artist to artist, instead of mother to daughter.

What I have experienced is that empathy takes time and creativity, patience, especially as someone with a migration background and if intergeneration trauma is involved (where there are ruptures in language, world views, physical distance), empathy is hard work!

I feel like empathy in my family is one thread that has is heavily ruptured. Sometimes I feel like my mother doesn't understand my position. Sometimes when I tell her about a painful memory of the past and she makes it about her. I understand that she is still in pain and has experienced more loss, and needs more comfort and reassurance maybe, but the constant denial and downplaying hurts nonetheless.

Empathy

I've been doing interviews with my mother about each of her drawings. The process felt like we were jumping into her drawings where they became glowing portals to the painful past, into another dimension just like the sci-fi tv shows I grew up with. Surrending to her stories and re-tellings of the past felt like being plugged into another world just like the movie, the Matrix. Each interview felt like a time travel adventure into the past. We leapt into places we had never traversed before and it was illuminating. We had never visited these places because I was too busy trying to intellectually undermine rather than witness how they came to be. Of course there are many other reasons why we never visited, we couldn’t reach these places through plain conversation as our spoken and written communication is a path of treacherous mistranslations and misinterpretation. We've needed all the modes of communication available to us: image, words, gestures, translation software, storytelling and immersion to help us get there.

This process of immersing into her drawings is how I understand the work of 

, the practice where one tries to as much as possible, to rid of judgement and preconceptions of the other, in order be present and engaged with the other. Through this project, storytelling and immersion has helped me practice empathy.

If immersion has allowed me to listen deeper, storytelling has allowed me to present her with contrasting information from the inside without destroying her world from the outside.

Immersion

Intergenerational Self

Intergenerational Trauma

+ how to mend motherhood and it’s ghosts

Unmendable

My recent practice can be defined under the umbrella practice of mending, an embodied practice of stitching the ruptured binaries that have been violently torn apart over hundreds of years by what bell hooks describes as ‘‘imperialist, white supremacists, capitalist, patriarchy”. This describes a reality of interlocking oppressive structures that have reorganized our world view to uphold the belief of false divisions and hierarchy between head/heart, male/female, male/other, science/intuition, rational/emotion, design/craft, Western/non-Western, architecture/textile, public/private and abstraction/lived experience, etc. My practice aims to weave together literal and metaphorical mending, care practices and non-Western approaches that question hierarchical knowledge production and aesthetic regimes. If practice + theory = praxis, mending might be positioned as the +, interconnecting the two. Mending is also a family business, an embodied heirloom passed down from my mother that I’m now turning into a critical instrument. However, so far I’ve practiced mending within a pedagogical context. What this fellowship will offer is the opportunity to extend this practice into the context of artistic and design research.

Repair: https://glossary.mg-lj.si/related/repair/652

(summarise from CD course, from my own practice)

Mending as Making

I’ve been grappling with finding a way to talk and write about her. As an artistic researcher embedded in Western art and design institutional traditions, my default approach was to intellectually justify my mothers intentions. I thought that by writing about her life and conditions I was giving context to understand, accept her and appreciate her. (motivation letter for art school, sandberg fellowship, short stories)

But instead I objectified, her, took away her voice and replaced it with mine. Turned her into a study object for audiences in the West to pity, humanise and validate. It came from a place of protection. I realise that I had been doing that to myself too. I had used my own armour on her and it was ill-fitting. it did not feel right for either of us.

on top of that, I was struggling with deep resentment and anger towards her that were triggered by some of her drawings. After many months of discomfort i became conscious of the fact that i had haboured deep feelings of abandonment, neglect and rejection which manifested in anger as a child and evidently as an adult.

there were moments, where I felt like I couldn’t continue with this project until she recognises my pain and is willing to mend me too. I began this project thinking I should mend her, I as a daughter should put in the effort, but in fact I realised that I needed her to mend me too. Only during this project have I realised how much resentment I had carried and how important it is for me that she see and know my experiences.

many times we fought over her more politically charged imagery. I saw her depiction of the China US rivalry as a regurgitation of cold-war rhetoric, a simplistic narrative of victim/perpretator. I was angry that she saw China as completely innocent and US as completely responsible for all the evils of the world. There was no complexity in her narrative. And so coupled with my own unresolved emotions towards her, I met her with an antagonistic confrontation approach – of wanting to dismiss her world view. Needless to say, it didn’t work because I wanted to tear her world down, without fully understanding how that world was built.

There were months of silence and it was hurting me.

I had to get creative and find a way better way to enter her world, in order for me to let her see her world in a different world. Simply saying it was wrong was not working, because I wasn’t listening,

It took me a while but I had arrived at the idea of stepping into her world, her arena, her stories and conspiracies, and the way I would do is is through story-telling and immersion as deep listening.

Storytelling

i write to the unconscious (spiritual) part of me, history, past, present (this is spectral publishing). That is my audience. (Immortal and mortal.)

I’m interested in exploring the ghost of intergenerational trauma, as a figure to research, embody and channel. I see Spectral publishing as ways to communicate, converse and dialogue with the ghost but also to circulate these findings amongst mortal and immortal audiences alike.

1) Joss paper, otherwise know as spirit money or ghost money, are paper offerings that are burnt in Chinese ancestral worship rituals. The practice can be seen as the continued practice of filial piety even when relatives have passed into the spirit world, a gesture of care expressed in the burning of paper offerings of money and replica’s of material luxury goods to ensure the material comfort for deceased relatives. If the burning is a channel for earthly beings to send to the celestial heavens, Chinese spiritual belief suggests that dreams are the channel in which ghosts send messages to the living. The spirit money is the messenger between the living and the dead, and a signal between past, present and future. Beyond using this channel to send my deceased relatives material luxury goods, I’m interested in experimenting with material and ephemeral forms of contact through spectral dialogues with the ghosts of my ancestral trauma. From this point of view, i’m drawn to the materiality, design and history of the joss paper; how do living beings design, communicate and publish for a spirit world? How do I to communicate with the realms beyond mortal life? What can be considered alternative forms of value to send? These are questions that I have framed as ’spectral publishing’

My mother and her aesthetic have played a large role in mending my Westernised perceptions of beauty. She has taught me to look at design through the Chinese value system of feng shui, which is based on spiritual and auspicious placement of objects in space to synchronise the energy of an individual to their environment. I’ve been closer to my mother’s value system and aesthetic sensibilities and her craft feels like an act of destiny making. What I learned of modernist design was how to communicate – or, more precisely, how to schmooze with mortals of a specific Western and privileged background. But what I learned from my mum’s aesthetic was how to communicate with the realms beyond mortal life – design as self-fulling prophecy.

So for the show at A tale of a tub, I published my mother’s drawings, our stories and conversations, on spectral garments, life-sized joss paper clothes designed to communicate with our ancestors, updating them about our messy attempts to mend the ruptures of migration; distance, time, language, culture and heartbreak. These spectral garments are experiments in spectral publishing. More and more, it feels like intergenerational mending, not only between my mother and I, but through this fire induced spectral medium we’re also attempting to reach the ghosts in our family in the hopes that they can hear.

Departing from the idea that code-switching can be understood as a form of survival, i'm interested in clothing as a form of protection. Historically, protective clothing or armour was worn to shield against physical dangers such as the natural elements or human/animal foes, however there were also protective clothes that functioned as amulets to shield against dangers of a psychological or magical nature. Such clothes were worn as counter-magic to ward off bad spirits and maleficent forces.

For my project, I would like to explore the idea of what a contemporary psychological armour could look like for POC who are psychologically harmed by code-switching into predominantly white cultural institutions such as art schools, museums and galleries in the NL. Perhaps we can think of present day maleficent forces as institutional racism and discriminatory micro-aggression that cause to manifest double consciousness, inferiority complex and disguised communication.

Spectral Publishing

Embodied Publishing

Deep Listening

Intergenerational mending ‘stitches’ are experimental methods and practices that my mother and I have engaged with during this process. Many of these are metaphorical terminologies that have assisted me in critically reflecting on my position and therefore reframing how I speak, write, and think about my mother, our relationship, intergenerational trauma, migration politics, and the larger context of Chinese diaspora. Akin to a darning sampler that showcases sewing techniques on how to mend damaged textiles, these stitches of intergenerational mending are compiled together forming an intergenerational darning sampler of sorts. Please keep in mind that these articles are messy as work-in-progress projects are and set up this way to help me organise my thoughts.

Affective Labour

Research

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