Say What I Have to Say Including This Text You Are Reading without Leaving a Trace and Therefore Never Feel Threatened
2019
Text, Internet-based performance
In 2018, Wang invited the public via social media to engage with a message she authored:
say what I have to say including this text you’re reading without leaving a trace and therefore never feel threatened.
Participants were asked to select a single word from the text and have it tattooed on their body. The open call circulated widely online, reaching over one million people. Approximately 1,000 individuals registered interest, and among them 21 were ultimately selected. The resulting tattoos, distributed across bodies and geographies, formed a fragmented yet unified message, one that only exists in its entirety through collective presence.
The project explores the paradox of speaking without leaving a trace: the desire to voice something urgent while preserving personal safety. By employing tattoos as a medium, symbols of permanence that are yet often intimate, the work interrogates authorship, censorship, and the mechanisms of collective memory. No single participant carries the full statement; instead, they form a living archive, one destined for eventual disappearance.