The Dream that Flocks South《睡去依依随雁断》

Solo Exhibition and Performance at Acentric Space, Shanghai, 2021

I am performing inside my immersive sculpture during the exhibition.

I made near 100m2 of handmade paper from the Qing dynasty banned novel The Dream of the Red Chamber. I reference the line “The land is cleansed by snowfall” from this book, covering the floor with large sheets and suspending dreamy constructions from the ceiling. On the exhibition opening, I invited the audience to tread into the work, tearing and soiling it. In the sculpture, I did a Chinese Kunqu Opera performance of the love story The Peony Pavilion, which is an important reference in The Dream of the Red Chamber. The shattered dream of romance in our performance is metaphorical to the destruction of culture.

The young lady Du Liniang drifts into a dream in which she has an affair with Liu Mengmei, a young scholar who approached her with a willow branch in hand.

When Du Liniang wakes and realizes the love affair was all a dream, she is heartbroken, falls ill and dies eventually. The strength of her pursuit for love merits her return from the underworld. Her ghost wanders in the world of the living, to seek the young scholar of her dreams.