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.
