Title: Untitled(Mouth)
Year: 2005
Medium: printmaking | silkscreen printing, fabric, acrylic rods
Dimension: 86 x 60 in
My Broken Language series documents my gradual and painful adaptation of a foreign culture into my native East Asian identity between 2004 and 2008, when I moved from Taiwan to the US for graduate study. This series surveys a dual, paradoxical, and ambiguous state where two cultures and identities clash and reform. The journey of diaspora has begun.
As a Mandarin native speaker who grew up in Taiwan and is bilingual in English, I am more sensitive to the language barrier and difficulties in pronunciation and expression. By overlapping English and Chinese characters and printing the new script on enlarged images of my teeth, tongue, and lips—the three organs we use to speak a language—I generate a new state where two cultures clash yet mingle into a reformed, ambiguous identity.
