Cecilia Lu

featured artist

Elegy for Exported Desire

Where in this wide country

I carry an inheritance
of farmwork fieldwork harvesting tea

A type of green tea, called Long jing cha
dragon well tea

ii.

I tried to drown it when we moved to this house.

While my parents bought land,
I tried to donate, exchange, return, and cash it in.

But it stayed buoyant as ever,
surfacing amidst my protest.

iii.

My grandparents spent a few summers here.
(Their house by the foothills of the tea filled mountains was
torn. Forced down along with their neighbors’—
along with the village.)

When I picture it, one instant it’s there
and the next it’s razed.
But it doesn’t matter.
Raised in place are apartment buildings:
concrete re-places wood.
The tea fields are combed,
straightened out like a hedge maze
Monuments are erected.
One of which: a big tea pot made of stone, because
the CCP is didactic as hell.

But it doesn’t matter.
My grandparents are content,
paid for their displacement.

iv.

Here, they try accustoming themselves in a lonely
4BR2BA suburban home.

Space is good. It means they can till the backyard until it bears
tomatoes cōng bell peppers garlic qīn cài.
Routine is good. It means they can drink tea rather than water,
brewing it so strong that my tongue furls against the bitterness.
They revel in the fragrance.

Long jing cha now sells for thousands of RMB / pound.
My grandpa used to roast it by hand,
fresh picked tea in a flaming dry pan,
stirring it with his fingers, because
even a wooden spoon could introduce impurities.

vi.

The metal wire that marked out a rectangular plot of garden
now hides against wildflowers and spiny weeds.
My grandparents aren’t here this summer.
The new apartment is built.
The neighbors flood back too, now strangers in their hometown,
now climbing flights of stairs home—
on a building’s fourth floor—
no single units anymore.

On Google Maps, all the trees are gone.
The main road is gone.

The tea fields have **** (4/5) from 346 reviews
on TripAdvisor. One is titled
“body and mind refreshing environment.”

Artist’s Statement

This installation was conceived as a way to connect histories of Chinese export porcelain to theories of melancholia and race. Collages of found imagery from Chinese export porcelain—objects made for European markets to satisfy the Western desire for an aestheticized form of the Other—were projected upon unglazed bowls and vases from one side of the gallery to the other. One face of the objects was adorned with orientalizing imagery while the other retained the bareness of the vessels, creating a directionality in the projection of ideology and gaze. The ceramic objects were placed in a table-like setting, invoking a false familiarity of a family dinner, as the red-and-white woodblock prints strewn underneath added a layer of memoriality and mourning: Connoting the form of joss paper—“ghost money” burned at ancestor’s graves as offering and veneration—these prints depict different instances of melancholia as metaphor for racialization and of literal grief. The starkness of the imagery (a family portrait redefined, Afong Moy, the first Chinese American woman who became a travelling display, and Gold’s Spa, the site of a recent mass-shooting) hides behind decorative patterns, partially withholding the fraught imagery from the audience.

Cecilia Lu is a Chinese-American artist based in NYC. Her art practice engages multi-generational and familial histories in the context of mourning and non-western healing practices. She works primarily in installations composed of ceramics, video, performance, and printmaking. She received her BFA from Cornell University.

Find more of her work at https://zcecilialu.cargo.site/