Residency: Veins

The Veins series is a cross-disciplinary art project I developed in 2024 during a one-month artist residency in Fengdeng, a Dong ethnic village in Qiandongnan, Guizhou. The project centers around the textile labor, bodily experience, and natural environment of Dong women. Grounded in the practice of “shared labor,” I worked alongside local Dong women in their daily routines of spinning, weaving, natural dyeing, and all other textile production process, intentionally adopted the very materials and tools they used daily—such as looms, sewing machines, and natural dye baths—immersing myself in their labor ecosystems.. Through deep engagement, I developed a body of work that spans textiles, video, photography and performance, aiming to explore the fluid and complex relationships between female subjectivity, manual labor, cultural inheritance, and ecological entanglement within minority communities.

During the residency, I built an in-depth connections with several Dong women in the village. Through continuous co-working and dialogue, I observed that under the pressures of modernization, most younger generations have ceased traditional textile production. The responsibility of preserving these textile practices has thus fallen passively onto middle-aged and elderly women who remain in the village. Dominated by patriarchal economic and familial structures, these women have little agency over their careers. Their labor becomes both a pathway to limited economic empowerment and discursive space, and at the same time, a form of constraint—a means of survival that binds them. This dual role causes them to unconsciously endure the suppression and deprivation of subjectivity and creativity within the standardized routines of textile production.

Historically, Dong society is rooted in a matrilineal structure, and textile labor has played a vital role in both local economies and cultural transmission. However, the traditional division of “men till, women weave” remains deeply embedded within a patriarchal framework. In my creative process, I was profoundly struck by the primal connection between Dong women and nature: they harvest dyes from the mountains, sense the land through their bodies, and embed their labor deeply into the ecological and social fabric of their community. This led me to further reflect on the intricate interplay between traditional craft, the natural environment, female subjectivity, and patriarchal systems.