'His and Hers' Mother Size: 153 x 106 x 68cm
Medium: Curved polished metal (mat)
Edition: 20 + 4 AP
If Chinese culture and society place near-impossible demands on the husband, these pressures are a fortiori even more intense and stressful for the wife. Anyone who has stood at a bus stop in a Chinese city during rush hour and seen women sprinting to catch buses while all the men saunter leisurely along well knows the truth of this statement. Nowadays, Mother usually holds down a full-time job, but still bears the charge of running the household, cleaning, cooking, etc. The drudgery married life demands from her is aptly illustrated by the character (fù - 'married woman'), which in its original form showed an image of a women wielding a broom. Mother is also subject to the scrutiny of her resident in-laws, to whom she occupies a subordinate place, and this scrutiny may at times devolve into querulous carping and even physical abuse. Initiation into the cloistered world of her husband and in-laws is often a rocky rite of passage circumscribed by elaborate rules:
She descends to the kitchen on the third day,
She washes her hands and makes the consommé,
But wishing to understand what suits her in-laws' taste,
Sends it first to little sister-in-law in haste.
Confucian doctrine imposes a draconian code upon Chinese women, and though the pressure has eased somewhat recently under the impact of modern modes of thought, it remains immense. Chinese women often have to bend over backwards to please and discharge their spousal and maternal duties. Even the shadow cast by this work seems to be bent in genuflection, like the character (fù - 'married woman'), whose original pictogram was an image of a woman curtsying deferentially to a man. Li Dazhi arrests this submissive posture with hyberbolic understatement in a dazzling design in flawless execution that speaks volumes in a single sheet.
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