Scarecrows

2023

120-140cm x 30cm x 30cm each

Installation

Hand-dyed noil silk, stainless steel

I settled my studio into an abandoned meeting room at Dajing Village in 2020. Factories like the one I am situated at are scattered around the village. Although Dajing Village is an urban periphery, it still holds a slower pace than the modern city and has a less condensed population. Except for a few Majiang houses and restaurants, no place in this village is busy. Scarecrows started from me wandering and observing the village, and this work also reflects a change in my thoughts after I rooted in the rural area.

The lack of young working labor and fertile lands, decaying old factories, are problems facing in front of Dajing Village. However, for elderly workers and local villagers, it provides a gap to breathe between the farmland and the modern city. I take photos of the village first and then hand-dye fabrics referring to the colors of Dajing Village I recorded. This dyed material is a physical memory of the village and a venue of nostalgia. The outfit of each scarecrow comes from the clothes local villagers hang outside their farmlands or on the road. Instead of mimicking nature, my gesture of making these scarecrows is more like my creative misinterpretation of the fields there.

In the process of creating this work, a poem is raised naturally and a drum sound is echoing constantly in my mind. The poem is a reflection of how I feel about rural areas like Dajing Village in contemporary China, while the drum sound is from a female worker who also works at the factory I stay at. She practices drums every other day after work. The object, poem, and sound, combined as a whole of my thoughts and feelings in this specific context.

I especially feel grateful to Ms. Liu Yuhong ( born in 1967 ) for providing her drum sound for this work. Yuhong started learning African drum from social media beginning May 2023, before this, she had been practicing electronic keyboard for more than a year. Different from industrial chaos, birds, planes, and motor vehicles, the sound of her practicing every day is a fascinating accident that takes me away.