2024

This moving image work was filmed in a pig farm on the outskirts of Shanghai. I appear nude, walking and running across the muddy ground, my feet and body covered in earth. Written across my skin in brush script are the “24-character Socialist Core Values” introduced by the Chinese Communist Party in 2012—political slogans that remain widely visible in public space throughout China. Within this setting, I embrace and kiss a male figure, who uses black ink to smear and gradually erase the slogans from my body.

The work reflects on political ideology not as a form of overt masculinist authority, but as an attachment pressure resembling maternal symbiosis, intimate, moralised, and difficult to separate from the self. Under this system of moral regulation, the film asks where individual freedom might be located, and whether intimacy and desire within personal relationships can operate as a resistance to political inscription.