stay curious, stay young.
Mirrored Tale
Year
2021
Location
Amsterdam, NL
“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist”, Vladimir Nabokov.
The exhibition presents two design research projects by Weixiao Shen (b.1996, China), Story of Cuju and Temari, and Underneath Another Moon. Each of the works comprised the mirror image relationship of objects and their social contexts. This is a tale about I and the other, lying between traditional handicraft and modern design, between feminism and its social roles in Asia Society, and between ideology and utopia.
Curator: Yang WANG (Founder of Beyond Heritage)
Exhibition period: 25 June - 04 July 2021
Venue: Cha x Art x Amsterdam
Address: Eerste Constantijn Huygensstraat 78, 1054 BW Amsterdam
Support：Cha x Art x Amsterdam
Poster Design: Fin Zhao
Underneath Another Moon
Underneath Another Moon is a fictional scenario, also the work for her master graduation, exhibited in Dutch Design Week 2020. As a 90s generation designer born and raised in China, she went to the Netherlands for her further study, where she encountered the Chinatown, a place she found familiar and distant at the same time. Based on her research in the history and social culture of these western Chinatown, the artist established a fictional history of the third Opium War in 1880, and fantasized a future where China became the winner of the war and colonized Europe with Chinatown in a standard set by the modern real-life westerners. Through a great amount of social symbolic research under the western context towards “Chinatown” and a revolutionary work to overthrow Chinese traditional cultural symbols in the original context, she built up a seemingly absurd utopian Chinese concession full of Chinese and Western ideology.
Story of Cuju and Temari
The idea of Story of Cuju and Temari originated from the history of how Cuju in China and Temari in Japan evolves. By analyzing the mirror image relationship between these historic and evolutionary sports of Cuju and Temari, and power/social status in Asian males and females, the designer reflected the definition of female roles in Asian cultural context and explored the reconstructability of female quality to object functionality. She applied the Temari technique to three modern pieces which can represent Asian female characters under the traditional Asian cultural circumstances: rice cooker, sewing kit and high heels. By applying the traditional Japanese handcraft in modern object design, the designer used the representational female embroidery handcraft to overthrow the stereotypes toward female duty in modern Asian society, depriving these objects of their functionality.
