Untitled (corn piece), 2023

Inkjet on silk habotai, wood, type on mulberry paper, inkjet on transparency, looping audio
Approx. 9’ x 4’ x 5’

Artist Statement:

This installation engages with my family village’s traditional practice of braiding and sewing dried corn husks into circular mats used as portable seating. Corn was a staple crop that they grew up until a few decades ago. I am drawn to the materiality of these mats and how the plant was used in its entirety, embodying a type of sustainability outside of that pushed by the white-western environmental epistemology. The physical labor put into weaving the mats feels like a piecing together of identity, of stories, into something that sits and travels and wraps around itself.

I feel an urgency to document and archive everything from my family’s village as it slowly dissipates from rising rural migration in China, impacts of Western environmental neocolonialism, and global capitalist trends. In all of this, I find myself misaligned—culturally, temporally, and geographically. But as much as exploring and redefining this family cultural practice is about translating and negotiating these ideas with my own life, it is also about larger eco-cultural death and the ways we prepare for it.

Here I mimic the practice of weaving corn—corn that my family planted and grew and cared for—yet my hands hold the husks of mass-produced supermarket corn from Giant Eagle. My hands are misaligned, and the illusion of a continuous braid is in reality a result of carefully editing the same leaves together over and over again. Nonetheless, I still handle them with care, and they still carry the stories of daily life from my family’s village. The elusive and disembodied quality of these memories, which make up my own recognition of myself, only become grounded and made real through the physical tangibility of the natural material. The corn husks for me are a canvas for cultural imagination, portals to explore my identity and heritage outside of the physical time and space I inhabit, forging new meanings and embodiments of past tradition as I move through the present and into the future.

From these mats I learn that all identity is weaving; all memory is transformation.

Poem text can also be found here

Lucy Zhang

Artist Statement: