Title
College
College of Fine Arts
Date of Award
2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Program
Graphic Design
Thesis Advisor
Duane McDiarmid
Faculty Advisor
Mark Franz
Faculty Advisor
Jennie Klein
Abstract
Memory Bread, constituting a daily performance ritual and the post-action objects, seeks to address the generational decline of mother language use in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a post-colonized province of China. I chose to eat sliced white bread in the performance and later casted concrete sculptures as the extension of the action for both substances’ capitalistic nature. Being an invasive material that took over the traditional architectural lifestyle, the use of concrete mirrors the pervasive cultural and ethnic assimilation in China. Meanwhile, the materiality of concrete being a mixture of various substances also metaphors the mixed culture that Chinese-Mongolians are living.
Creative Commons License
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Recommended Citation
Nisiqi, "Memory Bread" (2020). Art + Design Masters Theses. 2.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/art-masters-theses/2
Included in
Art Practice Commons, East Asian Languages and Societies Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Graphic Design Commons, Indigenous Studies Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Language Interpretation and Translation Commons, Modern Languages Commons, Performance Studies Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Sculpture Commons
Comments
Memory Bread is a performance work of me studying Mongolian words by consuming them. I would write one Mongolian word and its Chinese translation on a slice of bread, only subtract the portion of the bread with the written word, eat it, and then pronounce the word that I have consumed to prove that I have learned. The duration of this continuous action varies depending on my physical and mental ability to eat. This action presents me, as a Chinese-Mongolian, who is longing for my native culture yet powerless to retrieving it. I assumed, “mother language” should be innate in its children, however, the reality is that the difficulty of learning is almost painful. Therefore, eating sliced bread was presented as a study method to learn Mongolian. Though absurd, this daily action for people living in a globalized society expresses my understanding of the learning process of a mother language, easy and mundane.