Yidi Wang: Belongings
In his poem Where Is My Mother written almost a hundred years ago, Chinese American Cubist painter and founder of Diamondism Yun Gee asked,
That mother of mine, how it tore my heart
To leave her across the sea,
I who was part of her -
She became all of me -
O, God, how could I speak?
A question Yidi Wang repeats to the woman who gave her birth at the heart, if not uterus, of her ongoing project about the ties that bind which extend beyond the maternal as something matriarchal to become a laboratory study bearing fruit, or ersatz test tube babies as offspring standing in for missing her birthplace, her homeland.
Through her body as metaphor for the reproductive process, the artist strips the outer layer of skin to bare her inner self connected by umbilical cord as if filial piety but what she presents is also a family portrait, a clinical version of the Madonna (in absentia) and Child. So who is she? What is the nature of their relationship? And why such feelings of emptiness, distance, and maybe even guilt?
Our roots, our origins become biological and chemical is what Yidi Wang wants us to consider. The whole allegorical system wrapped up culturally, politically, and historically where invention is the mother of necessity.