Mother Tongue

 

2026

​​​

Department of Visual Arts, Western University

​

After immigrating to Canada, I have had to adopt English as my language of work and study. My “mother-tongue” language, Chinese, only appears in the conversations within my family and the Chinese community; however, the longer I am in Canada, the rustier my Chinese gets. This linguistic diminishment also applies to my daughter who was born in China and came to Canada at age five. The “Mother Tongue” series investigates this sense of loss, and the increasing feelings of nostalgia and melancholy in losing the first language as immigrants in the diaspora. In the titled artwork, I will laser cut from a long scroll of Chinese Xuan paper, 3500 regularly used Chinese characters. Some characters are still attached, while some fall off the sheet during the process. The fragility of the sheet and rusty paper surface expressively presents the instability and loss in the linguistic “in-betweenness.”