In this performance, Wang positioned herself in a bathtub filled with soil and roses, a nod to the iconic bathtub scene in Sam Mendes’s American Beauty. Aged with makeup to appear in her sixties, approximately her mother’s age, Wang was joined virtually by her mother, who appeared via video call from her hometown of Hohhot.
Throughout the performance, Wang remained silent. Her mother, however, engaged directly with the audience, responding to their questions using twelve pre-selected quotations from Youth (2002), J. M. Coetzee’s semi-autobiographical novel. The excerpts, marked by emotional austerity, reflect on artistic self-formation, fraught relationships between artists and their mothers, and the objectification of women by male artists who project alternating idealization and revulsion.
Excerpts include:
He has a horror of physical ugliness. When he reads Villon’s Testament, he can think only of how ugly the belle heaumière sounds, wrinkled and unwashed and foulmouthed. If one is to be an artist, must one love women indiscriminately?
He knows that to condemn a woman for being ugly is morally despicable. But fortunately, artists do not have to be morally admirable people... If his own art is to come out of the more contemptible side of himself, so be it. Flowers grow best on dungheaps, as Shakespeare never tires of saying.
How can he make her (his mother) accept that the process of turning himself into a different person that began when he was fifteen will be carried through remorselessly until all memory of the family and the country he left behind is extinguished?
He is proving something: that each man is an island; that you don’t need parents.
After the performance, the installation remained in the gallery for an additional month. The roses were left to decay over time.