I carried a 100ml bottle of water from one area and pour it into the next, brought water from Thames pour into Lake Michigan, Lake Michigan water into the Pacific, Pacific water into the Mediterranean, and at the end, brought Mediterranean water back into the Thames, which it turns to a closed water circulation loop. These sources of water would have been integrated as one, but it is our artificial distinction in structure. In this way, I want to rethink the way in which institutionalised structures encapsulate us as an abstract image. An identity that should not have been easily defined.
I have been away from my hometown for quite a while now traveling between different countries. Each time I travel to a new place, I felt like I am the water being poured into the lake. I always bring something with me, that differentiates me from people who are born and raised in the place that I’m moving to. But oftentimes without even noticing, my identity will gradually be fused with people around me and I will then become a tiny part of a larger group. Just like when the bottle of Thames water being poured into Michigan Lake, there will be no more Thames water, but it eventually drifting back to Thames because of me. Through this work, I intend to discuss the fluidity of identity in this globalized age. By Mobilizing myself in different boarder, as a Chinese woman, through this way of travelling between Europe, Asia and America while displacing water, I am using an extremely primitive superstitious act of using myself as a medium of circulation and drifting in a misplaced water in this neo-liberal era of European and American dominated globalisation. The subtle dislocation and alienation of my identity as an Asian in the context of globalisation.
Everything would drift, just like water.
