Forget Sorrow Grass: An Archaeology of Feminine Time

Guangdong Times Museum is pleased to announce its first exhibition in fall 2019 Forget Sorrow Grass: An Archaeology of Feminine Time, curated by Jianru Wu and Sirui Zhang, opening in its main gallery on Saturday, September 14. The exhibition presents 26 works from Doreen Chan, Patty Chang, Cécile B. Evans, Jes Fan, Christopher K. Ho, Hsu Che-Yu, Ma Qiusha, Ad Minoliti, Peng Yi-Hsuan, Aki Sasamoto, Rose Salane, Wang Tuo, Zhang Xiaogang, and Yunyu “Ayo” Shih + Zijie, in which the museum continues its exploration in gender issues, especially from the perspective of individual recollections.

“Forget Sorrow Grass” is one of the most common roadside plants, but can also be an online profile name of a woman, one that we can find in our everyday lives. To name oneself “Forget Sorrow Grass” implies a conflict solution that is common among femmes, which is to rely on individual agency to process and ultimately forget the pain inflicted onto them.

“Forget Sorrow Grass” points inward, and this orientation is no accident. The habit of swallowing takes shape gradually in an expanded period of time. By “decompressing home” in the dimension of “feminine time,” the exhibition reviews and rewrites an informal history of the orientation and constructions. As compared to a linear timeline, which is goal and progress oriented, feminine time is a sensual dimension extracted from linear history. Within feminine time lies economically unquantifiable housework, undercurrents of emotions bound with intimate relations, as well as personal anecdotes that are being ignored in formal historical writing. The exhibition aims to further investigate the question that if such feminine time is relative, what is the power structure that is shaping the construction? In reality, how do we use the feminine timeline to reorganize experiences and materials that already exist, and process the emotions and entanglements within intimate relationships and our own devotions?

Feminine time folds in home space, like a singularity, where movements, judgements, communications, constructions and deconstructions all become symbols to be invaded and released. Through decompressing home, the works in the exhibition discuss the physical environments around femmes, along with the desires, intimacies and violence generated in the surroundings, responding to the challenges inherited from historical and traditional values, as well as the new ones emerging from contemporary new liberalism situations and ever developing technologies, especially biotech, and questioning traditional femininity and kinship.