Fish Tale Tally | Michelle Chang Qin

From 29 September to 3 November, Michelle Chang Qin (Chongqing, 1996) presents an installation of recently developed works at P/////AKT as part of the exhibition Fish Tale Tally. Through objects and installations, Chang Qin envisions labor, its process and its products, as offerings to a vast absence: amputated speech, forgotten rituals, partial histories that escape a collective memory yet leave unspeakable burdens behind.

Champollion fainted, she says, once he had wrested their secret from the hieroglyphs and saw them turn transparent. The serpent no longer with power to strike, but biting its tail. I smell my salts, my packets of words, panicked. I’m no longer sure whether they shape my reality or have too little mass to interact with naked matter. Then they would pass right through the earth as I will in death.
(Rosmarie Waldrop, “Conversation 12: On Hieroglyphs” from Reluctant Gravities)

Drawing on the material and gestural vocabulary of an assembly line, she proposes sculptural instruments of pauses and repetitions. Threads may be woven densely or loosely to create fabrics of care, ornament, filtration, or capture and concealment. Stemming from makeshift spaces of temporary facilities and interstitial structures often used at production sites, her work articulates a perpetual in-betweenness and fluidity that reflect the unfinished thoughts and wandering avatars of a person engaged in monotonous tasks.