Qingyang Jenny Cui
Her main works are interactive performance, scenic set-ups, composite material installations and writing. She is also involved in organising events, building women’s matriarchal communities and fundraising.
Her work focuses on shifting power in human interaction and her graduation project Add Footnote to Me, Zhijun, and Jia discusses in detail the subtle shifts in power in her dual contexts of human interaction, bringing about interest and creating difficulties in people’s communication. These include interpersonal relationships, emotional expression, conflicting ideas of consciousness, non-violent communication, Chinese immigration issues, and the difficulties of female independence in East Asia.
She is also active in community building and organising events. She discusses feminism in China at the moment and the building of social cohesion in matriarchal societies. She and other young Chinese women partners set up the Young Chinese Lady Reading Groups to foster a sense of female independence and bring together matriarchal forces. She initiated and brought together 22 Chinese students from art schools to form the Chinese Society in August 2021, which is active and provides local resources for Chinese students in social networks to help them adapt to life in Glasgow.
Female Salon
This project of Female Salon is a collection of my oral history as a customer of haircutting. I cut my friend’s hair while we were communicating with women about the difficulty of finding a comfortable haircutting environment, using the feminist approach, consciousness raising as the method. A lot of material is not recorded, videoed, or photographed, but only through the oral narration of the experience. Because of the safety of the women’s space, no video is allowed, and there is no post-mortem recording for women to get used to not being gazed at and to deepen their self-nurturing.
The project expresses the expression of women’s roles, the social division of gender, the safe space for women, and the oral history of matriarchal power. During the research process, it gradually became clear that matriarchal social forces are more present in barbershops in Chinese cities with poor economies and non-Han cultures (Confucianism culture which focuses on the importance of personal ethics and morality), while barbershops in big cities have a more monotonous aesthetic. The gender distribution of barbers is determined by the economic level of the city, with all male barbers in developed cities and all female barbers in non-developed cities. The outcome of the project is to collect oral histories of women barbers, to accumulate the matriarchal power of women barbers in different cities around the world, and to conduct awareness-raising groups with people in Glasgow (the city I based in).
Add Footnote to Me, Zhijun, and Jia
Stow Building, Glasgow, 6/2022
This work is a discussion of the lack of Context encountered when communicating with people. I invite visitors to come in and read the text in the red space. The interest and patience of the audience is what the whole project wants to discuss during the exhibition: “human communication” .I can only wait until the exhibition to see if the audience is interested in reading my text, if they are willing to take the time and patience to read my footnotes and clue cards.
