女: Radical 38

2019

What are the origin stories of the words we use daily? How does language govern the way we perceive gender? Who has the right to reimagine the languages/genders/futures?

女: Radical 38 is an ongoing research-based project investing sexism embedded in the Chinese language. The project focuses on the radical 女 (nǚ), which means "woman" or "female" in Chinese. The radical 女 (nǚ), a pictogram of a woman with breasts kneeling, is included in characters such as 奴 (slave), 奸 (traitor), 妒 (envy), and many others.

In the first iteration of the project, the studied characters are printed in the style of traditional calligraphy tracing book (描红字帖), with which I learned how to write as a kid. The radical 女 (nǚ) is only shown as outlined, offering the audience the chance to unlearn and relearn writing it. The reimagined character collection are currently underdevelopment through a series of participatory workshops where participants become language creators, stroke by stroke, radical by radical, character by character. All the invented characters will be archived in a dictionary, which will be opensourced later. Here includes some highlights from the first workshop participants, including invented Chinese characters for They/Them pronoun, queer, gender fluidity and Metoo 🍚🐰. More coming soon.

This piece is onview at 女 Nǚ: Other Half of The Sky group showe at B4BEL4B from January 18 to March 7, 2020.

Photo credit: Yuehao Jiang

Info

Time: 11/2018 - Present
Type: Individual Work

Category

Research
Alternative Narrative