ARTIST STATEMENT
The series, “Once I opened my Dad’s Drawer”, focuses on the relationship between people, kinship, gender, and generational differences in east Asia. In order to accomplish this, I take my past experiences and recreate them for the camera. I explore the intergenerational conflict between myself, my parents, and their parents, and use photography to explore the interconnectivity between our lives to navigate the tangle of emotional complexity between three generations. The series emphasizes the contrast between traditional attire and cosplay to visualize the awkwardness my parents must feel about their hidden desire in relation to the outward appearance they maintain. Furthermore, the disjunctive elements have a playful vibe and reveal my parents’ secret personalities, and depict the joy associated with the release of repression. “Practicing Dining” is a four-hour durational performance piece capturing two hours and forty minutes of a rice eating ritual. In this performance, my partner and I shared a bowl of rice, taking turns to eat a single grain until the bowl was empty. Despite the cultural resonance of completing a meal with rice, the experience defied expectations. While the act didn’t result in physical fullness, challenging conventional notions of satisfaction and delving into the complexities of cultural practices and individual perceptions. “Practicing Dining” invites viewers to reflect on the intersection of the futility process, personal experience, and turning the ordinary act of eating into a contemplation on the profound within the mundane.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Magicfeifei is a Chicago based artist currently pursuing MFA in visual arts at the University of Chicago. Her major medium is photography along with performance, sculpture and video. My photos are staged, pictorial, structured, it contains mundane objects like teeth, rice, tables, food, foot, and daily action: wedging, eating rice, sleeping, standing.These elements weave into an unfamiliar domestic space, to deliver the ridiculous cynical scene. She found mystery not in fantastical imagery but in everyday reality, a perfect example of the mystery that can be found when ordinary, yet incompatible objects collide. In my work transform the lived experience to unfamiliar size, magnify reality and space , subvert the context, ways of using mundane objects to subvert the familiarity intersecting in my work.use domesticity as a channel to deal with everyday life. It is in the surprising juxtaposition and shift of the scale of these common and unrelated images that mystery, magic, and humor merge. I believe in the magic of art , the magic moment I create, the magic in daily life. Like stand up, make fun of mistake, use sarcastic and irony to make fun to joke about to not to care about to reveal the truth and behavior, directly , bluntly , straightforward, embarrassment, my goal is to make other embarrassed when i was young till now, challenging something, spikes are everywhere on my body, be a ox, stubborn, and genuine to my art work. Me not taking art too seriously is how I take art seriously.
© magicfeifei