Xuanxi Ge
Untitled
Year: 2021
Media: Agar, organic letters, organisms, video
The poem I want a dyke for president written by Zoe Leonard in 1992 continues to have a profound impact on the public, not only on queer communities. Untitled is an alive and organic installation based on it.
In this project, the poem is recreated, which involves Chinese, and some of the contents are redacted to address the issue of censorship between different cultural contexts.
Meanwhile, the organic letters spell out the “I want a dyke for president” and “I want a fag for vice president”, and serve as nutrients to the organisms, which gradually feed on them. Progressively, the texts "disappear".
Untitled addresses the following questions: What happens when minorities and mainstream communities interact? How can we build, together, a better and more just world?
Art Statement
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I'm Ge Xuanxi, a Chinese artist, feminist, and activist investigating the topics of queer culture and feminism.
As a lesbian who lives in China, I have experienced prejudice and discrimination, such as countless harsh words and unfair treatment to minorities in this society. By engaging with humanism and social concern in my practice is my way of using art as a means to spread my voice and express my feelings. I always believe that as we try harder and make our voices louder, we can make a safe and inclusive world that only exists in our wildest imagination come to life in the future.
I usually show these topics through multimedia-based installations. At the same time, I‘m also expanding the possibilities of my artistic creation, such as bio-art. While in my early works, artist books often appear because of my background in visual communication. But no matter how the form changes, my original intention of artistic creation and expression has not changed.