Jiangliu Dong
董江柳
Artist
Motherhood—A Golden Standard(耐)
Materials:
Artist’s Hair Found in Her House, Text， 24k Gold Thread, Sterling Silver, Stainless Steel, Video (performance documentation)
During the first year after my child was born, my hair began to fall. I collected the strands that gathered throughout my house and wove them together with gold thread into a narrow strip of textile, about ten inches long. I made it into a brooch with two pins: one I wear on my body, the other worn by the house.
Wearing the piece, I stand outside in the snow. I remain still until my body can no longer bear the cold. The small woven strip holds me and the house in a thin line of tension.
The hair carries the trace of what the body sheds. Woven with gold—a material used to mark value—it becomes a fragile measure of maternal labor. Between my body and the house, the brooch holds a quiet pull—care, loss, endurance.
The works Motherhood —A Golden Standard and Motherhood —Nourishment ( 汁 ) mark the beginning of Jiangliu’s new line of inquiry, which explores the repositioning of the situated and embodied experience of motherhood as an emergent condition that surfaces through performance and material processes. Continuing to use text as material in her practice, Jiangliu creates a bodily encounter through the suspension of meaning, allowing the audience to encounter the experience of motherhood as a felt, physical presence rather than a fixed representation. The accompanying texts function not as explanatory captions, but as linguistic material processes that parallel the physical material operations of the works. By deconstructing Chinese characters through non-standard, non-linguistic methods and rendering their English translations intentionally partial and at times speculative, the texts suspend their stabilized meanings and return language to a bodily logic—one grounded in drops, heaviness, convergence, falling, measurement, and turns. At the same time, the works emerge through sustained material research, in which bodily substances and labor-intensive processes are tested, transformed, and staged over time. Hence, text becomes a stage where motherhood is experienced not as a narrative, but as a felt condition—fragmented, nourishing, heavy, painful, and continuously in the process of becoming.