Dansiyu Zhu

Being both a female and a citizen prompts me to explore inwardly to reveal the native identity of my background, my cross-cultural education and my ideology of gender. My current practice relates to female protest and anti-gaze, and responding to the injustice faced by women today, as well as their specific difficulties in the marriage system. This is developed from the variety within my identity. In my creation, my identity is no longer simply a person who has fallen in love. but also a citizen who is concerned about my status in my own country.

Currently the law does not permit homosexual marriage in my motherland, and in recent years it has strictly restricted publications including queer content and tried to marginalize these voices. So it’s my current consideration to clearly communicate my views on feminism and make it available to wider audiences. Because I don’t want us to be domesticated by the silence. Even more terrifying is, I worry that we are forced to be silent by our fear of the silence, and eventually become a part of the silence.

Inspired by the French feminist pioneer, Hélène Cixous, I took her idea of Women's Writing to visualization my idea of Women's Drawing. I established my visual language that includes tone of colour, body shaping, lighting, and atmosphere creation, to demonstrate a subtle, fickle longing to show off, combined with the reserved temperament of an oriental female. I also create a dual narrative system composed of positive images and negative text to achieve the symbiosis of utopia and dystopia in a narrative.

The survival dilemmas of women and queers is my subject. I have been censoring and modifying my position to sympathise with marginalized people and minority groups with humanitarian care and compassion. At the same time pursuing the questions of how do I want to be seen? how do I want to be exposed to my audience? And how do I want to present in the face of censorship?