YIDA

With Home, I draw attention to the emerging cultural introspection on intimacy, especially on the relationship between parents and children, between elder generations and younger generations in East Asian family, exploring the complicity and ambivalent feelings in family relationship — love, repression, fear.

For my family, it is company, support and care of each other that bonds us and shapes my perception of love. I intend to present this love experience in a scene of familiy life composed of dining room and pachira macrocarpa. A dining table and a chair in warm light drops a hint about childhood memories of joy and laughter when family members were having dinner together, sharing their thoughts or interesting experience in everyday life. Hot dishes at home and emotional support made up a peaceful heaven for exhausting souls to relax themselves after a long day of toil. Behind the table, there is pachira macrocarpa, a common household plant in Hakka family, which carries special meaning of wealth and prosperitiy, health and longevity. The plant has been accompanying my family since my childhood.

Although love nurtures my family, it hurts when intimacy between family members is built at the expense of self-sacrifice and depression — to suppress one’s own feelings, to stifle one’s passion, to grin and bear whatever happens in patriarchal clan. In Home, I employ a magenta-purple serpent menace to reify these suffocating feelings in love experience. Purple is a contradictory color for me — bluish purple relates to my childhood memory of elegiac couplets at the funeral, a metaphor of death, grief, fear, guilt, and confusion; magenta-purple, though a hint to death as well, is bright and attractive. Thus the magenta-purple serpent is a metaphor of intimacy — we long for it, but it hurts a lot. The serpent is wriggling on the puppet girl whose legs are broken, suggesting that the child, trapped by fear of guilt and loss, has been turned into an emotionless puppet, but in her imagination, she was like the leaves of pachira macrocarpa which have grown into fish and swam away. Is it possible to escape from suffocating relationship? With a hand behind the curtain, Home leaves viewers some suspense and invites viewers to give their own interpretation. Who is holding scissors? If you are the one holding scissors, what would you do — to kill the serpent? to kill the girl? or to kill the fish?

Will anyone survive?