Letters in Dust
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Authors
Wei, Qingxu
Issue Date
2025-05-07
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
Identity is not something we inherit, but something we negotiate. My work explores how personal memory, familial bonds, and state-imposed structures shape identity. As a second child during China's One-Child Policy - a population-control measure that shaped the lives of generations' experienced how identity is influenced by both intimate relationships and institutional pressures. Though my birth was officially permitted, my place within the family was something I gradually came to understand - shaped by both affection and discipline. This tension informs Letters in Dust, an exhibition that examines how the self is formed and transformed at the intersection of personal experience and institutional power.
Through drawing, installation, and text-based practices, I examine how identity is not fixed but continually reconstructed through memory, loss, and care. I treat identity not as a static archive, but as a living and embodied process - inscribed in everyday gestures, emotional residues, and the fragile objects we keep. My materials - charcoal, pastel, rice, paper, dust, and ink - reflect the intimacy and impermanence of this process. Charcoal, derived from burnt organic matter, reflects the fragility of political legitimacy. Pastel, soft and easily smudged, suggests the instability of identities conferred by bureaucratic documents. These mediums echo both the domestic and the administrative, allowing the personal and the political to coexist in quiet tension.
In my practice, I explore how art can mediate the space between presence and disappearance, silence and remembrance. These tensions reveal how identity is often shaped not only by what is seen and spoken, but also by what is omitted, hidden, or quietly withheld. In my family history, unspoken narratives often left deeper marks than those retold. Each work becomes a site where memory and identity are not just recalled, but physically reassembled. I am drawn to what is easily overlooked: a grain of rice, a smudged fingerprint, an incomplete face. These gestures, though small, resist erasure. My work is not only an act of remembering, it is also a slow, deliberate way of becoming. Through intimate materials and repetitive labor, I trace the contours of identity as the process of persistence: a negotiation with absence, and a refusal to forget.
Description
An immersive exhibition of drawings and installations using rice, paper, charcoal, and ink to explore memory, family, and identity shaped by personal history and state power. The work blends delicate materials with intimate, conceptual narratives.