Project Statement

 90's Softness

For me, interior decoration and construction are like silent recording tapes of the past. They document personal history. My thesis project is an installation titled “90's Softness”. I generated the material for this project from childhood memories of the old house where I grew up. It was many years after I moved away that I realized my house was gone. I regret that I had not said goodbye to it. My installation, composed of five sculptures and a drawing on a wood panel, is a memorial to these elapsed years, a remembrance of the 90's. Each of my sculptures speak with each other. They function as my alter egos, my guardians in this universe. Their common attributes include repetitions of texture, bodily gestures and lightness, mutedly golden tones, which calls back to the style of the old house. Everything is on the scale of my human body (or larger). I use industrial materials like EPS foam, but also plywood, stain, wall covering fabric and ceramic tile. These are materials that I remember from my home. I use them to create a sense of  intimacy and familiarity.

Most sculptures in this series are guided by intention and intuition. Scales and shapes are less intentional, while I consciously create textures to hold specific memories. For example, the sculpture, My Mom is the Only One Who Can Read This Artwork, depicts the wood flooring of my old house but I have transformed it into octagonal wood columns.

Nice to See You Again, Pool. is a shallow circular pool. It is an imperfect replica of the exact Fengshui(风水) that used to sit at the bottom of the third-floor atrium in my childhood home. The original one was lost forever when my old house was demolished. Here I re-built the pool based on drawings from memory that I have made countless times, as a child. I left the edges of the sculpture irregular, and the shape of the sculpture is an imperfect oval just like in the quickly scrawled drawings. By using foam bricks to build an inner structure of the pool, I made sure that the infrastructure of my sculpture is beautiful and clean. This comes from the lessons about integrity that I learned from my family. For me, integrity stands for the equality of the inside with the outside. Integrity is important to me.

Wall is a sculpture about reciting ancient Chinese poems as a three-year-old to the soft, sound-absorbing wall. I drew on this abstract shape intuitively and cut it from a wood board covered in soft sponge mat and fleece fabric like the wall in my memories I used to lie against. 

Bonsai is a permanent potted plant for my deceased grandfather out of industrial materials guided by my intuition and memory. The sculpture is a straight thin column made by white thin ceramic tiles plugged into a ready-made pot. I slightly stuffed the loose green string on the top of the sculpture. I missed the time I spent with grandpa, planting and watering flowers together on the rooftop. 

Untitled and Scholar Rocks are my muscle memories of being trained how to exercise and draw certain Chinese Bamboo and Rock drawing formulas. However, the pieces ended with rebellions.

I construct a certain order during the process of sculpture making every time. My memories, inner logic and the appearance of the sculpture combine with each other to form this specific order. Sculpture is a proper, decent and elegant way to complete my self-construction.

Zeyu Xue

2024