Memory Bread

Performance | Sculpture Concrete, Sliced Bread, Edible Pen 2020

Concrete, Sliced Bread, Edible Pen

2020

I grew up with a Japanese cartoon Doreamon. Memory Bread was one of the episodes. Doreamon is a blue gadget cat with a magic pocket on its belly that within it you will find anything you need. One day, Doreamon’s friend, Nobi, didn’t prepare for his upcoming exams so he was panicking in his bedroom. Doreamon reached into the pocket and brought out this magical thing called memory bread. Nobi could just press a slice of memory bread on a page of his textbook, eat it, then he would memorize everything on that page.

I am Mongolian from Inner Mongolia, and find myself learning the Mongolian language as my third language, behind Chinese and English. There are over six million Mongolians born and living in China, most within the region known as Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Positioned in a rapidly globalizing Han-Chinese society, urban Mongolian families have been struggling between cultures for a long time. My parents who struggled in their career for the incompetence of speaking Chinese deliberately sent me to Han-Chinese school to study Chinese language and culture, so I could adjust to the Han environment better and suffer less. The parental choice of choosing Chinese as their kids’ first language was especially common for my generation of city Mongolian. However, this voluntary decision later became a guilt and punishment to their children. Language possesses the core of a culture in its history and philosophy and construction of the world. The incapability of using the Mongolian language to communicate is one part of the major guilt for my generation as we are witnessing an ongoing culture assimilation.

In my work, Memory Bread, I, as a Chinese-Mongolian longing for my native culture, confront a powerlessness to retrieve it. I assumed, “mother language” should be as easy and mundane to learn as eating slices of bread, however, the reality is that the difficulty of learning is almost painful.

Pop Piece 0

Performance | 20 min

2018

Pop Piece 0 is a quest from me as an individual to a broader audience about my social identity and position. Labels of identities such as Mongolian-Chinese, Asian, female, foreigner, outsider, etc, that I constantly receive deprive myself to feel just as a person, a subject.

This performance was very much dependent upon my audiences: if they would pick up the needle I prepared and pop the balloons hanging over me. The process of this interactive performance visualizes the process of objectifying people, individuals or certain groups.

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A Letter

Performance | 2 hours

2019

“Dad, learning Mongolian is hard.”

“爸爸，学蒙语很难。”

Concrete,

which is a composite material bonded by liquid cement, has been the foundation of contemporary city infrastructure worldwide. As a mixture of various materials, I associated the materiality of cement concrete with the post-colonized Inner Mongolian culture. This material represents the contemporary/globalized culture in Inner Mongolia, as well as serving the conceptual metaphor for the Mongolian people living in/under a mixed culture.