2016 - ongoing

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A Family of Three is an ongoing collaborative project between the artist and her parents in China, using photography, performance, and video to examine a contemporary Chinese family shaped by state policies, heteronormative ideals, and shifting notions of individual happiness. Rooted in autobiography, the work centers on the parents’ failed marriage and the fragile intimacy of their family unit, historically defined by the 1950 Marriage Law and the One-Child Policy’s model of the nuclear “family of three.”

 

Through staged domestic scenes, role reversals, and expanded gender performance, the artist destabilizes prescribed identities of mother, father, and child. Granting her parents creative control, she blurs authority, documentation, and performance, producing images that resemble family snapshots while exposing their underlying tensions and ideological constructions. Across videos and archival interventions, the project foregrounds intimacy, emotional distance, and gender-related desire and expression within the private sphere.

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As an ongoing archive, A Family of Three reflects on emerging feminist consciousness and enduring patriarchal structures, questioning how fantasies of the “happy Chinese family” are produced, rehearsed, and how they constrain and entangle individual lives over time.

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