The Husbands and I- part I (2010)

photo by Ruth Skinner

from a 352 husband collection

I wear my Chinese traditional dress, walking on streets and asking white males to have photo taken with me by suggesting them to act as my husband– to explore intimacy between two strangers in public space. immigrated to Canada couple of  years ago, and i  regard the whole process of immigration as a marriage, and myself like a mail order bride. I married Canada, suddenly transforming myself from a Chinese to a Canadian or a Chinese Canada. My identity is not constructed by Canadian  history, culture or its landscape, but the white males who are around me.

The physical encounter between me and the white males actually is an ideological confrontation between me and the Western social and political landscape that I feel I don’t belong to. By exploring intimacy with them, I try to not only reconfigure the established centered power that the privileged white males embody, but also question whether the culturally interpreted Chinese female body, both as a foreign subject and object, can be invested and exploited.

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Rice Performance Series–The Other Words

photo by James Zhang

four hours at Western Front Gallery

I set a table and two chairs in a gallery space. I sit on a chair, and a male mannequin in front of me. There is a big bowl of cooked rice on the table, I use a spoon to scoop rice, put it into my month, and slowly chew it until it becomes soft and warm. And then I carefully transfer the rice from my month to the spoon, and feed it to the male mannequin’s mouth. This process is continually repeated until the rice on the bowl is thoroughly transferred.

This performance refers that the sense of authenticity, integrity and beauty of resource language get lost in translation. In fact, the process of translation is like chewing up rice and feeding it to people. In performance, what I feed to the mannequin is still rice. However, this transformed rice has already lost its flavor and nutrition. It is the same in translation, clarity and fluency of source text might still be kept in a target text. However, the source text and the target text can never be the same because fidelity in translation is the root which tranlators strive to approach but it can never truly be reached.

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