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.
