DAI CHENLIAN

When time leaves its marks across generations, personal memory can act as a lens through which broader historical change comes into focus. Dai Chenlian’s solo exhibition Waxing and Waning of the Augustness III centres on the life of the artist’s mother, continuing the trajectory of her ongoing “Mother Trilogy.” Covering the period from 1954 to 2025, the exhibition transforms a deeply personal story into a reflection on shared experience. Through the triple imagery of old houses, looms, and female migration, the symbiotic entanglement of individual destinies and the context of times is deconstructed, outlining the life poetry of a generation of Chinese women as they have endured in dispersion, migration and perseverance.

The exhibition title is drawn from a line by the Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin: “As the osmanthus is sought, the moon shifts in its course.” It not only echoes the birthday of the artist’s mother on the eighth lunar month, but also implies a metaphor for the female destiny spanning thousands of years. The delicate fragrance of the flower and the steady movement of the moon suggest a kind of inner resilience—though time shifts and circumstances change, the soft yet enduring vitality continues to shine brightly during the long river of history.

The project grew out of conversations between the artist and his mother. The uneventful recounting about the old house by Dai Chenlian’s elder mother touched his heart deeply, becoming the starting point of the creation. At the heart of the exhibition is a reconstructed old house made from parts of a traditional loom. The rhythmic clanging of it becomes the melody that connects the current life with past memories of his mother, linking labor, residence and the fate of women. By drawing parallels between the structure of the loom and the house and extending this into a theatrical setting, the exhibition combines painting, installation, and performance to bring together historical memories, intergenerational emotions and the traumas of the times, creating an immersive landscape that interweaves reality and fiction, present and dreams. As the final chapter of the “Mother Trilogy”, the exhibition integrates visual, auditory, physical and cinematic languages, using sound narration, postmodern physical theater, light projection and traditional shadow puppetry as its presentation mediums to unfold the journey of migration from birth to old age of the artist’s mother, and recounting her struggles facing dilemma, her attachment to her homeland, and her simple reflections on life and death.

These fragments of memory not only represent the mother’s individual life story, but also serve as a microcosm of many Chinese women of the same era. Through the microscopic perspective of personal narratives, these works dissect the living conditions within the broad historical context, allowing individual and collective portraits to illuminate each another, completing the reverse flow from private memories to collective emotions. In the overlapping shadows of the present and the past, it becomes a poetic re-examination of life, the era, and emotions.