Limb

Limb is a memory I have carried silently since childhood.
White gauze, white cotton balls, fingers fading to pale,
and vivid red blood—together formed a scene that remains permanently frozen in my mind.
In 1982, my mother suffered a workplace injury and lost a finger. A decade later, when I was five years old, I accompanied her to a prosthetics factory in Shanghai to have a custom-made replacement. The prosthetic fingers, stored neatly in an iron box, became objects I often played with as a child. The soft, flesh-colored silicone, the hard nail caps, and the crumbly joints injected into my young memory a strange mixture of curiosity, fear, excitement, and cruelty.
Limb is a materialized reconstruction of that memory. Through casting, I reproduced molds in the same proportions and scale as my own fingers, arranging them in complex sequences. The process exaggerates the conflict between sensation and reality, intensifying a sense of unease—so that I might learn to coexist with, and gradually dissolve, the lingering shadow of childhood.

Exhibition Site

(With my mother, 1987 — the year I was born)

Physical trauma is visible and immediate; trauma from time is hidden and intangible. Yet both leave traces. After 30, 40, 50 years, they manifest in similar ways—like the wrinkles and age spots that now map the back of my mother's hand.

In this way, the limb and the passage of time become one and the same.