In Echo of the Enigmatic Nights
2024-Ongoing
In Echo of Enigmatic Nights is a cross-media installation rooted in a fictional narrative: a young Tanka woman, drawn by her curiosity about the distant mainland, secretly builds a canoe and sets out to sea. But the journey transforms her—over time, she becomes the canoe itself.This poetic transformation serves as a metaphor for how women’s stories are often left to drift at the margins of recorded history. The Tanka people, historically relegated to the sea and excluded from land-based governance, embody this liminal status—neither fully visible nor completely erased. Growing up in Fuzhou, a southern coastal city of China, I often heard fragments about these women. Their histories floated among silence, as if swallowed by the waves.Through this project, I seek to give shape to those fragments. The ocean becomes a metaphor for both freedom and invisibility; the boat, a vessel of survival and self-erasure. The story does not present a linear revolution, but a quiet defiance—anchored in feminine intuition and longing. It is not that the woman sails to reach a new land, but that she becomes the means of crossing for others, eventually turning into a boat that carries countless women across the water in search of voice and place.Enigmatic Night unfolds through fictional archives, sculptures, sound, text, and images. These elements are not arranged to form a singular narrative but rather to evoke a submerged history—one that must be felt, pieced together, and imagined by the viewer. It is a story not only of transformation, but of transmission: from sea to land, silence to speech, and from one woman to another.
