I use intestines as my material of choice, creating textiles, installations, and sculptures focused on the topic of ambiguity. I always feel in conflict by what is considered to be right, natural, or traditional by the world around me and question all of the “obvious” things that society has thrown at me. These conflicts probably come from my personal experience. As a Mongol with Chinese citizenship, I have experienced a certain duality ever since I was born, being raised with Han culture and Mongol culture clashing against one another. Therefore, facing the fact that I am both Mongol and Chinese, I always turn to self-skepticism. This has led to my interest in ambiguity, double meanings, polysemy, and anything separated by vague lines. The ambiguity between inside and outside, natural and unnatural, life and death. 

 

I believe that making art is delving deep into the self. For me, that meant using materials from the five livestock animals (cow, sheep, horse, goat, camel) that have had a profound impact on me. That meant especially using intestines as my material of choice. Unlike wool, the material I used previously, intestines intrinsically represented both life and death to me. Furthermore, learning more about intestines, I realized that their function is very similar to my identity. In order to live, living creatures must ingest food from the outside, and expel what they cannot use. The gastrointestinal tract is indispensable. Intestines are part of this tract and are both the entrance and the exit. They are a part of the body’s surface that faces inwards, as well as a part of the outside world within the body. This concept of “both inside and outside” found in intestines is in complete resonance with what I want to express about my identity and is the reason why I decided to use intestines as my main material for my futures pieces.

 

My drive for creating pieces comes from the ever-present desire to find these ambiguous boundaries. Why am I conscious of inside and outside? What is the boundary? I do not think of inside and outside as opposites, but rather as ambiguous concepts that are created through repeated contrasts. I will create pieces by repeatedly focusing consciously and unconsciously on the specificities of the materials, half controlling them and half letting myself be guided by them.