May the earth spirits guard your
seedbeds
When I met Pei-Hsuan Wang’s grandmother, she was embodied in a ceramic zhenmushou, a Tang Dynasty tomb guardian. The first time I met the artist’s mother, she was the Chinese character of Wang’s last name, inscribed on the back of a griffin-like beast. Wang’s niece Iris was having adventures in the fantastical Central and South-Asian miniature-inspired landscapes on paper, while her nephew Levi was a peacefully sleeping papaya. Her aunties huddled together in a group embrace, fortified by scaley bodies and adorned with little tongues of mischief, protecting the mythical beings that carry the world on their shoulders. This is a description of artworks by Wang, imbued with the stories and mythologies that have been passed on in her own family. Her work is an act of generosity: by hosting the viewer into her world, she reveals how one individual’s life is part of a greater enmeshed web of experiences; how small instances of alterity give shape to a layered and complex earth, one that is multiple in its essence.
Pei-HsuanWang portrays herself and her family as creatures that morph whenever they must, leaping from one life to another whilst staying connected through their kinship and the hard labor of matrilineal care. ‘I left my body to occupy others’ is the title of this book, referencing the possibility of shapeshifting. Being able to change yourself or allowing yourself to be changed is a core idea in Wang’s work and thinking. Shapeshifting is a transgressive form of survival, especially when your environment changes quickly and drastically. Wang’s sculptures and drawings are vessels for storytelling, bearing the burdens and joys of generations of women that have been shaped and moved throughout geographies by migration and colonization. The artist was inspired by the influential science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who granted the female protagonist in her novel Wild Seed (1980) the power to morph into any existing species in the universe. Butler’s character, Anyanwu, uses this power to strengthen and secure the survival of her own community.[1] Shapeshifting becomes a life-saving and crucial form of care, for oneself and the world one inhabits.
Such ideas about the role of transformation in community- and identity-building is in line with the intersectional nature of care, a term that has been theorized to the bone and jeopardized by hype-culture in contemporary arts. Yet, it remains essential to think about what it means to care in and with the world today, especially when societies seem to fail in protecting its members. In theory, three dimensions of care are identified: on the level of labor, on the level of affect and emotion, and on the level of politics and ethics. In reality, however, practices of care cannot be divided in constructed sections but are constant crossovers. For instance, forms of labor can be affective, and emotional care can be labor. Care is ambivalent and political, and thus necessitates flexibility to transform, change its shapes. The work of Wang cannot be simplified as a solely aesthetic homage to her female-gendered family members. The references in her work reveal the complexities of multicultural struggles, migration, ethnicity, and forms of care in daily lives that exceed the personal and become political. Rather than perpetuating the harmful patriarchal expectations that women’s societal role is caring for their offspring, Wang’s portrayal of her female family members is, quite on the contrary, exemplary of the political intersection between women’s labor, matriarchal (social and economic) care, and the experience of othered and racialized female bodies that migrate. Wang’s symbolic language is informed by her and her family’s knowledge and experience of Taiwanese and Chinese culture and politics, the arid social politics of the USA and the reality of (structural) racism against Asians, and more recently of her life in Belgium. Even if certain experiences are lived by previous generations, they haunt the next generation like a phantom limb. Care can be reclaimed politically, according to the multidisciplinary feminist scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “making it again capable of nurturing; the transformative seeds we wish to sow.”[2] These women were the shapeshifters who planted their wild seeds wherever they could set root.
The intergenerational transformations in Wang’s works range from spiritual beings and mythological creatures to humans, plants, fruits, pop culture personas like Mulan, or animals. They underscore the more-than-human politics that hide behind the story of the women in her family, and with those also other persons in the world. The self-fictionalization and hybridity she conveys through sculptures and drawings, connect experiences of being multiple, of being part of a cosmic world, of being in touch with ancestors and future generations to come. It relates strongly to the questions that arise also in the work of de la Bellacasa: “What does caring mean when we go about thinking and living interdependently with beings other than human, in “more than human” worlds? Can we think of care as an obligation that traverses the nature/culture bifurcation without simply reinstating the binaries and moralism of anthropocentric ethics? How can engaging with care help us to think of ethical “obligations” in human-decentered cosmologies?”[3] Emblematic of this experience, is the beautiful connection between the gourds and papayas that Wang uses as visual tropes, her grandmother’s labor in her lychee orchard in Taiwan, the American zucchini seeds that her mother planted on a rooftop garden in Taiwan when she moved back after years of living in the USA, and how this care for nature and growth became a symbol of their shapeshifter identities through different migrations. They created their own seedbeds, literally and metaphorically, to survive.
How perfect is the vocabulary we owe to the natural world to describe these experiences of living in colonized and mixed cultural geographies and of migration! Planting seeds, being rooted, becoming uprooted, finding your soil. Wang’s practice is an exploration of the seedbeds that one makes in one’s life, looking for self-rootedness despite (or sometimes thanks to) changing environments. Today, our social and political lives are threatened by a growing adaptation of different kinds of fascism and authoritarianism, as if we’re holding a mirror to the past without seeing its reflection in the present. How will it be possible to show ethnic pride in a context of harmful nationalisms? How can we protect our roots without succumbing to hate or cultural self-appropriation?[4]
Another pivotal component that proves the political definition of care in the work of Wang, is her use of craftsmanship and her chosen materials and techniques. The glazed multicolor ceramics she makes are called Sancai, a technique popularized during the 9th century Tang Dynasty in China to make apotropaic sculptures for the entrance of tombs and vessels for funerary goods inside these graves. They were mythological guardians between the fleshy world and the spirit realm, called zhenmushou.[5] Another variant were the lokapala, Buddhist warrior figures.[KZ1] These ceramics are considered to be the highest point of Chinese art and culture, an argument that was still used as Chinese cultural propaganda during Wang’s early childhood in Taiwan. Objects are politically charged, a fact that also informs the practice of Wang and her focus on craftsmanship: by making these works by hand, ritually, repetitively, slowly, meditatively, she reconnects brain and hand, practice and heart. It is an ultimate form of artistic care, connected to the care she chooses to practice to nurture her ancestry and certain cultural symbols from all times and geographies that have marked her life - in skeptical or critical and loving ways equally. As physicist Karen Barad writes, “all bodies, not merely “human” bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity - its performativity,” referencing any kind of ‘body of matter’ on an atomic level.[6] It’s a way of lifting the patriarchal burden of the binary separations between body and mind, spirit and flesh, ancestor and present form. It is hidden in the wing-like protrusions on her sculpture of herahma (grandmother), in the little tongue sticking out of her sculpture of her aunties, in the curvy back of the griffin bearing her mother’s married name and the dreamy lychee tree in her drawing.
The clichés and misconceptions that lead to misidentification and racism in our society today can be resettled, perhaps, in finding new apotropaic symbols that are more personal, intimate or relational. The haptic energy and the secretly whispered prayers and dreams that Wang imbues her sculptures with, can serve as an example: her works are like earth spirits that try to ward off the Othering gaze from her self-made ‘seedbed’, her rooted yet layered identity. May the zhenmushou guard all your future seedbeds too.
[1] Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed, (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1980).
[2] Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics In More Than Human Worlds,Posthumanities, Vol. 41, Cary Wolfe (series ed.), (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 11.
[3] Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics In More Than Human Worlds, p. 13.
[4] I use this term to describe a certain level of orientalizing, exoticizing, or appropriating one’s own mother culture as a second- or later-generation migrant, being a direct consequence of growing up under a Eurocentric or other colonial hegemonic gaze.
[5] ‘Apotropaic’ is an art historical term, adopted from Ancient Greek, to describe certain symbols and images that are used to ward off evil spirits or protect the wearer of the image from harm, like the head of Medusa on shields or the evil eye (nazar) on wearable beads, and sphinxes, lions or griffins at the entrance of important buildings.
[6] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 153.