Author: uwu

Audio work, graphite and ink on paper and personal memorabilia
45cm x 32 cm, 14.8cm x 21 cm 
6:09 minutes

Exhibited as part of Listening Biennial LAB, Brother Joseph McNally gallery. September 2025. 

Exploring the inheritance of generational trauma and the postmemory through oral narration, the artist played the role of an interviewer in this short documentary style piece. Awkward and uncomfortable, she probes her parents with questions about their childhoods, which were strife with hardship as they grew up in a hostile, totalitarian regime under Mao Zedong. Navigating familial bonds, attempts were made to learn more about her parents’ untold sufferings under the guise of everyday conversations.

Dialect is also present as gentle resistance against the extreme ideals of that era that were taught in standardised Mandarin Chinese.

Video work shown on CRT TV, video projection
6 minutes

In collaboration with Sarah Noorhimli. Exhibited as part of Pesta Raya by Zarina Muhammad, Annexe Studio, Esplanade. May 2024.

Chinese ink on rice paper, performance video projected on white cloth, archival ink on bronze paper, personal memorabilia
3:08 minutes

Jialei researches Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and contextualises it in the Chinese diasporic experience. As a child of immigrant parents, the artist investigates the inherited traumas of the Chinese diaspora and looks at socio-cultural baggages of migratory experiences.

In her experience of fragmented identity, Jialei finds existing languages inadequate for self-expression. As such, she de- and reconstructs these languages to develop new writing systems. Resembling seal script calligraphy, the writing is not phonocentrically functional or usable. Rather, calligraphic processes serve as conduits to emotion – taking into account the grinding of ink, the gestures of writing and the re-assembly of information that produce new asemantic scripts.

This project acknowledges her family’s pain from authoritarian rule in twentieth-century China, offering space for mourning, healing, and identity reconciliation. It also questions the enduring impact of their pain on her, probing the essence of Chinese identity and why artists challenge Chineseness outside of China.

1. A Phantom’s Dictionary (2024)
A selection of characters developed over this project, made with vernacular

Mandarin, English, computational code, and emojis.

2. i want to go home, but i don’t know where that is (2024)

A video montage of the artist’s performance. She writes for 5 hours (the amount of time needed to fly from Singapore to Hangzhou, China), conveying a sense of distance, travel, and yearning. This work explores asemantic writing as a process and channel for emotional output.

3. Breathing, Gasping, Words Stuck in My Throat (2022–2023)

The first work in this series, exploring a verbal output of the writings. A letter to the artist’s great grandfather, a subject of constant occurrence in her family’s transgenerational transfers of memory, is written. The artist tries to read out her writings, but all that could come out were gasps of air in a futile attempt at reconciling with her emotions and difficult family histories.

4 Portals (2024)

3D scans of the artist’s great grandfather’s statue in China, with the plaque and ornamental background erased to remove him from state narratives. The artist wants her great grandfather to be seen as he is, just a man and an ancestor.

5. Get Well Soon (2024)

Inspired by the artist’s mother’s profession as a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner, TCM herbs are carved with the artist’s surname and arranged, along with a spiky ceramic cup. Ingestion and notions of healing are explored.Graduation work exhibited at The Molecular & The Divine, LASALLE College of the Arts. May 2024.

Performance video in redwood box, chinese ink on ricepaper, personal memorabilia (9: 51 minutes)

Chinese ink on rice paper scriptures, personal paraphernalia and performance remnants

hearth, Art Outreach December 2023

Diaspora as a phenomenon eludes a complete comprehension and its complexity only reveals itself through personal embodied feelings of displacement and fragmentation. Struggling to convey the entirety of it, the artist sought to create an alienated language derived from contemporary vernacular of English, Mandarin, computational codes and emojis. In an absurd yet honest jest, the performance redeems reassurance for a sense of belonging and reconciliation of conflicted identity and history.

First conceived April 2023. Exhibited as part of laughter is a breath away from a sigh, hearth (Art Outreach). November 2023. 

Performance
15 minutes

Asemic script writing in response to readings from Tse Hao Guang’s The International Left-Hand Calligraphy Association.

(Re)Visiting Sing Lit
The Arts House. Singapore Writer’s Festival.

Performance, 20 minutes

Struggling to convey the entirety of personal embodied feelings of displacement and fragmentation as a diasporic individual, the artist sought to create an alienated language derived from contemporary vernacular of English, Mandarin, computational codes and emojis. In an absurd yet honest jest, this second iteration of the work is a private ritual in which the artist reads out loud a second letter, written in the script, for her great grandfather. She hopes to reconcile with family histories.

Activated as part of across the way by Salty Xi Jie Ng at starch. October 2023.

Performance in collaboration with Muhammad Mustaghfir, 35 minutes

The activation is a low budget (un)serious meeting of two peculiar bodies who plan, dream of, speculate and anticipate what they might go through ahead in life.

It is in response to Moses Tan’s body of works—a caveat, a score—for Residues & Remixes at the Singapore Art Museum. September 2023.

Images courtesy of Jovin Lee.

Performance, 1 hour

Activation for Corporeal Inten/se/ts, as part of Walk Walk Don’t Run, starch. March, 2023.

Performance, 20 minutes

For a Brief Moment is a trio performance, supplemented by each individual’s ruminations and sentiments, revolving around notions of loss, memory and temporal encounters.

Mustaghfir

plus one
minus one
constant
my things
trees
dearest
(day)dreams
worries
pockets of time
plus one
minus one
any two of us
in the very short bittersweet moments
of joy and sadness
we share(d) 
learn, accept
choose
(un)willingly
to be grateful

Imah

We lose many things, 
anything, 
once valued and cherished,
parts of our identity, 
our freedom, 
our childhood dreams,
along the way, 
we lose passion and drive, 
our environment changes,
we lose someone dear,
a cherished lover, a life partner,
a loved one,
the young person, 
gone too soon before their time,
we lose an old one, 
a life well lived, 
a skin well lived in, 
creased with the many adventurous routes embarked on 

Jialei

lingering spirits
caress    ;
left me 
searching
    yearning
i grasp onto every piece 
                    every fragment    ;
but it is still 
not whole
seeking solace
three for the gods
four for the ghosts
give me the strength
to grind your bones
to drink your ashes
in this lonely journey
i think about you all the time.

Performed at Alliance Française de Singapour. February  2023.