Quiet Burden II
This work reflects the artist’s adolescence within the Chinese school system, where vivid memories coexist with subtle, persistent forms of discipline. Personal objects are embedded within translucent resin, preserving fragments of youth while simultaneously fixing them in place.
The softly coloured resin evokes warmth and nostalgia, suggesting a tender archive of growing up. Yet this apparent softness conceals an underlying structure of control. Encased within a rigid metal framework inspired by school gates and railings, the work creates a condition of physical and psychological containment, highlighting the tension between personal experience and institutional order.
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas of disciplinary structures, the work considers how education shapes individuals not only through visible rules but also through internalised regulation, quietly absorbed in daily life. Importantly, these structures may be perceived not as restrictive, but as protective or even caring. The resin’s preservative quality conveys safety and tenderness, while simultaneously immobilising what it holds, pointing to a condition where control is subtly disguised as care.
In dialogue with the artist’s broader practice, this piece continues an exploration of how care, memory, and control become materially embedded. As in Quiet Burden I and Soft Weight, preservation functions ambivalently: it protects but also constrains; it holds but also fixes. What appears as warmth, intimacy, or nostalgia may carry structures of expectation and pressure.
Ultimately, the work proposes that formative environments—familial, social, or institutional—do not simply support the individual, but actively shape and regulate them. Within these systems, warmth and constraint, freedom and control, become inseparable conditions of becoming.