My mother
is a cicada
Mẹ tôi là
con ve sầu
2025
Exhibition
“There is no center” group exhibition, ROH project, Jakarta, Indonesia.
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳 is a twelve-week long exhibition with the quiet provocation: how might we navigate a world without an axis? How do we make space for complexity and for contradiction?
Throughout the exhibition, artworks and texts enter at syncopated stages, in cases transforming or exiting entirely. At its core, the exhibition resists the familiar impulse to reduce, to simplify, to render the observable as well as the unobservable into manageable terms. It is inspired by artists whose works belong to a world of surfaces, objects, and production too often ignored, making revolutions that are gentle and profound in and from multiple places.
To refuse centralization is to acknowledge the restless, layered complexity of the present—a moment in which the drive to control, to impose order, has often come at the expense of what is vital, unpredictable, and alive.
Medium
Installation: Oản Ceramic shape & Phục Linh cake (Vietnamese Traditional Cake), ceramic.
Size: ~3m x 2m x 2m
Performance duration: 7 hours
Artwork Statement
“My Mother is a Cicada” is a multimedia work that combines performance and installation. It is inspired by an imaginary narrative that relates to a 17-day diary of a cicada, conceived as a fictional autobiography that records the cicada’s life before shedding its shell, written by the artist.
The narrative begins with a cicada awakening underground, uncertain of its species. It contemplates the worlds surrounding it and arrives at a purpose for its existence: to document its perception of Mother—the entity it perceives as the creator of both the world and itself.
As the diary nears its conclusion, the cicada grapples with the realization that its thoughts about the world amount to a dream of the body. The boundary between Mother and the cicada’s self-identity begins to blur. This confusion, along with a sense of loneliness, leads to a realization: all previous dialogues are merely illusions concerning the body of the cicada. It merges with Mother’s being, suggesting that it embodies Mother, and thus, departs from the world encapsulated within its shell, entering a new life cycle.
The performance presented in this work is conceptualized as a ritual of world-building and reuniting with another self. It explores intimate relationships and delves into profound questions surrounding the body, loneliness, and the intricate dynamics of life, death, and identity.
The performance involves the preparation of a Phuc Linh cake, and ending in the act of consuming the creation, a process that is rooted in the artist’s childhood associations with this particular cake.
Photo Credit: ROH
