Pain
Siyue Deng
Pain is an inescapable subject in life. It will always accompany our lives and is an element that exists in everyone's
life. There is pain in growing, in thinking, and in experiences. In my research, I will analyze the source of pain, use
design and installation as carriers to tell my own story and explore how to get along with pain. During this time pain
could no longer be avoided but needed to be faced and shared with humor in my own narrative language.
Ice Hand(2023)
Ice Hand(2023) is a deeply symbolic performance art piece that invites contemplation on the human desire for contact and warmth and the inherent risks that such vulnerability brings. This work features a hand sculpted from ice, a chilling yet delicate representation of my own. At its heart lies a metallic rose, thorny and enduring, symbolizing the perilous nature of our yearnings for connection. Suspended in the exhibition space, the ice hand beckons viewers to engage, to touch. Yet, with each human touch, the ice subtly melts away, a metaphor for the dangerous cost of intimacy. As the hand vanishes, the metal rose will eventually drop.
After coming back from the beach one day, I was sitting in the living room and suddenly thought that it's very likely
that no one would love me for the rest of my life, which felt very sad. I chose to dismantle a paper bag and wrote this
sentence on it with a burning cigarette. When I am nervous, I need a paper bag and a cigarette.
Back to womb
My relationship with my mother is not secure, but I still instinctively have the thought of wanting to "return to the womb." How good would it be if everything had never started? How nice would it be if I hadn't experienced all these good and bad things? Please let me go back to before I was born. This work involves me wrapping myself in red elastic fabric and trying to bind myself with ropes, imagining the experience of returning to the womb. In the sensations of suffocation and compression, I truly experienced pain.
Pain is I know I can't change anything.
I chose this text about Boring Day as the visual material. I often dream about every day that I used to take for granted. It was just a few years ago that our family of five was living an ordinary life. I play the role of my past self in the dream. When I wake up, I will feel huge tearing pain. .Time moves forward and never stops, and I feel powerless. Who I am? Who is in me? I burned the photo of us with my father and cut out the photo of us with my grandpa when I was a kid. At that time, I had already left with their passing.
HOW TO BE AN ADULT
Pretend to be an adult.
