Ancestor explores how ancestry can be reconstructed when family archives, genealogical records and connections to place have been disrupted by orphanhood and generations of migration. Taking personal experiences of migration as a starting point, the artist uses autoethnography to place private memory within broader conditions of mobility, displacement and interrupted cultural continuity, developing an alternative narrative of ancestry.
The work consists of three interconnected elements: a Stratigraphic Deposit, a Speculative Archive and a Wearable Relic. Personal objects are transformed into material remains within geological sections, then enter a process of fictioning, through which writing, images, the reorganisation of objects and material practice generate new relationships and meanings. This process brings memory, material and narrative together within a speculative system of ancestry.
The symbolic system is rooted in the artist’s Chinese cultural experience and memories of migration. Through abstraction and reorganisation, these sources are developed into a personal visual language of ancestry. The breaking, depositing and recombining of materials continually reshape the relationships between objects, giving material form to time, migration and memory. Meaning gradually emerges through the interaction of material, text, symbol and viewing.
The final jewellery piece draws on the way royal regalia uses precious materials, inherited symbols and ordered structures to construct historical continuity and legitimate authority. It brings separate symbols together into an apparently stable structure of ancestry. Melting, collapse and material intrusion keep this structure open, revealing it as continually formed and reinterpreted.
The project understands ancestry as a cultural structure shaped through migration, memory, material, narrative, symbols and the body. Jewellery functions as the central medium of the installation, working with text, geological modules and exhibition space to form the complete work. In this way, the project connects contemporary jewellery with installation art and explores jewellery’s capacity to carry extended narratives and support world-building within contemporary art.
Book reading link: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/443b82670e.html (English)
https://heyzine.com/flip-book/ade0ce485a.html (中文）
