Three Drops
三滴
2025
《三滴》 创作灵感来自艺术家于2025年参与策展人王澈发起的闽北“走神”计划。作品以福建女性神像陈靖姑为叙事起点，将神话中的观音血、神泪与雨水为象征意象，交织成信仰、身体与三界循环的一个空间，形成一个“众”字。这个字在汉语中意味着众人，映射着人民、社会和国家，同时也由三个“人”字组成，象征着个体参与自身命运的一种纠缠。在地方民俗与全球性别语境的重叠中，艺术家从个人的女性体验出发，试图解构宗教与政治对女性身体和精神的塑造，将“神性”重新化为一种流动的、具身的意识。
Three Drops was inspired by the artist’s participation in the “Lost in Encountering” project initiated by curator Wang Che in northern Fujian. The work takes the Fujian female deity Chen Jinggu as its narrative point of departure, weaving together symbolic images of Guanyin’s blood, divine tears, and rainwater to form a cyclical space of faith, the body, and the three realms.
Within this space emerges the Chinese character “众” (zhong), which means “the people” or “the collective.” Composed of three individual “人” (person) radicals, it signifies the entanglement of individuals in shaping their own destinies within the collective. Situated at the intersection of local folk traditions and global gender discourses, the artist draws from personal female experience to deconstruct the ways religion and politics inscribe and regulate the female body and spirit—transforming “divinity” into a fluid, embodied consciousness.
Three Drops
2025
40x40 cm
Pigment, fabric, embroidery 40 × 40 cm
My research began in early 2025, during my participation in “Lost in Encountering” , a project initiated by curator Wang Che in northern Fujian. There, I encountered the living worship of Linshui Furen (Lady of the Water), also known as Chen Jinggu—a woman whose story has been retold in many forms across centuries. In one version, she marries, becomes pregnant, and sacrifices her unborn child while praying for rain, later dying in battle to protect her family and being deified ironically as a guardian of childbirth. In another, she swears lifelong chastity, her virgin body becoming a vessel of divine power, and dies defending Fujian, transforming into an emblem of purity and virtue.
These multiple, often conflicting narratives reveal the tension between sanctity and suffering, devotion and discipline, that continues to shape female archetypes today. I am drawn to the ways Chen Jinggu’s story—rooted deeply in the soil of Fujian and in Asian culture—extends beyond its locality, resonating across time and space through her enduring identity as a woman.
In my work, the recurring motifs of Guanyin’s blood and tears become metaphors for transmission and transformation. Like rain, they fall from the heavens into human households, seep into the earth, and flow into the heart—traveling through the visible and invisible realms of faith, memory, and the body itself.