'His and Hers' FatherSize: 96 x 53 x 106cm
Medium: Curved polished metal (mat)
Edition: 20 + 4 AP
Traditional Chinese culture imposes strict filial requirements on a young man. Chief among these obligations is the one represented by the character (fu). In the ancient Oracle Bone inscriptions - carved by shamans thousands of years ago onto tortoise shell plastrons and animal bones for use in divinity and magic rituals, these inscriptions are pictographs representing the oldest Chinese characters -. fu depicts a man standing upright with a pin stuck through his topknot, and thus denotes a man who has attained sufficent age, status and material circumstance to assume the awesome obligation of continuing the family line, a cardinal virtue among the Confucian tenets.
Fu thus denotes the obligation to marry and procreate as soon as a man has amassed the means to become the head of his own household, and this tradition holds good to the present largely intact. Father's parents also come to live under his roof, so that his responsibilities may extend across three or more generations.
The delights of connubial bliss and fatherhood are too universally extolled to require any elaboration, but there is also no doubt that this condition also exacts a certain toll and imposes a heavy burden. Li Dazhi adroitly illustrates how this strain magnifies into a tectonic force over the years, as Dad at times feels he is carrying the whole weight of the world on his back and warps and folds like a sedimentary rock stratum pulled into the subduction zone where two tectonic plates collide. The resulting pressure of mounting marital disaffection and the widening alienation from offspring budding into surly adolescents, spurred into acts of disrepect and defiance by the blandishments of pop culture, together with concern for the health of his own doddering, senescent progenitors, bow down the head of the household until he becomes little more than a table from which provender and largesse are doled out. He is exploited and taken for granted, until his hair thins, the pin slips from his topknot, and he is unmanned. The poet Du Fu recounts an extreme example of this phenomenon:
The realm broken, only hills and rivers undefiled,
In the ruined city, spring's foliage shoots rank and wild.
The flowers drop tears at the memory of that fight,
They are full of ire, enraged at the startled birds' flight.
For three months' of fire, unquenched, the flaring beacons roared,
Just one letter from home would be worth a golden hoard.
On my hoary old head, I scratch at hair grown so thin,
And scarce, it refuses to hold my hairpin.
Spring Scene, Du Fu
Although Du Fu penned this verse in a time when civil war convulsed the entire Celestial Kingdom, it was the unknown fate and whereabouts of his family that he wrote of in lines of such hapless, hopeless helplessness. Though eventually reunited with his beloved wife and daughters, he remained a broken man to the end of his days, able only to look backwards and downwards, folded and bent like Li Dazhi's Father under the suffocating weight of it all.
Li Dazhi thus skillfully employs non-traditional media and techniques to voice an immutable truth as to the heavy weight of five-thousand years' worth of accumulated tradition which, to a greater or lesser extent, weighs every Chinese down like a millstone around the neck.
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