We generally associate bright colors with poison. For example, when we talk about a venomous snake, we tend to think that the more colorful it is, the more venomous it must be. Or when we’re talking about poisonous mushrooms, people usually say, “If it’s brightly colored, don’t eat it. Don’t even touch it.” So, in many cases, people equate toxicity with vivid colors. It’s a commonly accepted idea. So I went and talked to the aunties: “Can you imagine something toxic, like a poisonous mushroom or vegetable, and then knit it? If you can make it ‘look poisonous,’ that’s perfect.”

This group of aunties and older ladies are actually super sensitive to color. They love anything colorful. Also, from a knitting perspective, black is difficult to work with because it’s harder to see, especially for older people. So, building off of their preference for bright colors, I encouraged them to create a series related to mushrooms and plants, and called it “Looks Poisonous.”

Back in 2023, I invited the aunties to knit the staple foods they were most familiar with. For example, here we have works like Potatoes Grow on Trees and Wheat Grows by the Water. The titles for these two pieces came from a conversation I had with a young woman in our workshop. I asked her, “Where do you think wheat grows?” and without hesitation, she said, “by the water,” and added, “potatoes grow on trees.” The understanding that kids born after 2000 have of vegetables and grains mostly comes from what they see in supermarkets. Their connection to the land, to nature, and to food itself is quite different from previous generations. There’s this distance, a sense of detachment—they don’t really know how the soil relates to crops or food production. They’re also unfamiliar with the systems and logic behind agricultural productivity. So, in a way, these whimsical titles are not just playful—they’re a reflection of our current reality, and maybe even a commentary on the future.

The other series in this room is about cauliflower. It’s part of an earlier series we called “Tourists.” This series concentrates time into a single point. If we stretch out the timeline, human life is actually very short. And within that limited span, each person is really just a tourist. These future vegetables—or perhaps long-lost ones—exist within this vast timeline, as a way of showing this larger narrative.

Gallery 2+ is a kind of condensed presentation of all of our previous work. It offers a simple overview of the past decade of work under the banner of “Xiaofang.”
But what I really want to talk about is the QR code you can find in Gallery 2+. This QR code links to a few things we’re putting together: knitting techniques from the aunties, their videos, parts of their work. Our goal is to make all these aspects of the “Xiaofang” project, videos from all the aunties and older ladies, fully open and accessible, like a kind of open-source archive. It takes a great deal of wisdom, I think, to make handicrafts. For example, when our aunties try to knit something like a green onion or a bulb of garlic, it’s not simply a matter of replicating the image we have in our heads of onions or garlic. It actually takes a huge amount of thought and experimentation. One of our aunties, for instance, might spend ten days just trying to figure out how to make garlic look right, or make it into something interesting and meaningful. You can’t find a manual for this kind of work online or anywhere else. It’s all trial and error, building up skills over time through experience. So we’re starting from the most basic stitches, and going on to include all the knitting techniques and creative thinking behind the community’s work. The idea is to make this a fully open resource. And I think that this is actually something at the core of the “Xiaofang” collective: you can start anytime. To me, that’s the most important part.

The “Soul Bottle” series is actually about the seven continents. We started working on the series by researching each continent, and the fairy tales and fables about them. From these stories, we extracted the parts that talked about the idea of paradise. Then we’d share those stories with the ladies in the group. After listening, they’d pick out the parts that interested them. Then we’d help them find more references, give them materials, and they would make their knitted pieces. That’s how the “Soul Bottle” series came about. The title “Soul Bottle” is really about a place for the soul to return to. I think the idea of the soul having a home is actually pretty important. Otherwise, it’s like the soul is just endlessly drifting around.

The Asia section turned out to be especially fun. Of course, it’s the place that these aunties are most familiar with. As soon as we mentioned anything about paradise, the aunties immediately thought of Journey to the West, the story of Tang Seng travelling West to get Buddhist sutras. They made so many versions of Tang Seng, telling different stories: him getting married, going to the Kingdom of Women, fighting the White Bone Demon… it was a lot of fun. When we told the aunties about history, daily life, and culture on other continents—including legends and fables, even knitting techniques from these places—they were really curious. But with Asia, it was nice that they already had a deep familiarity with it. So their response felt really natural. They already had a close connection with these things.

Over the past couple of years, our studio has been going through a lot of changes and growing, and that means we’ve needed to hire new people. So I started using the HR app BOSS Zhipin to recruit, and every day I was receiving a ton of résumés. And I just kept thinking, all these CVs look exactly the same. It made me think, the aunties who’ve been part of our work have all been so full of life. Why couldn’t they present their own version of a CV? Like, write something about their life, their experiences. So we asked all the women who’ve been involved in the “Xiaofang” project to use leftover yarn they had and crochet their own “résumés.”

There were two things I really loved about this. First, even though I knew they were working on the CVs, every time I received one, it really moved me. The authenticity, the level of detail, it felt very unique. Because honestly, if I had to sum up my whole life in 200 words, it wouldn’t end up that different from what they’ve written. This isn’t about saying, “Oh, this is how aunties write their CVs.” I think that if anyone wrote 200 words about their life and put it on a little piece of fabric, it would feel the same. We’re not so different from each other. That’s the first thing.

Secondly, these CVs are kind of like the DNA of this era. They’re formed out of the whole group, not just one individual. This shift from the individual to the collective makes things really interesting, and gives things a kind of power. So I really really love these more than a hundred CVs from the “Xiaofang” community.

In the beginning, the idea for this room was to provide a space for people to rest. I think that “unloading,” or spacing out, is actually part of the body’s metabolism. The human body needs to unload in two ways: one is the physical, everyday kind of metabolism, and the second is mental—clearing the mind—which is also really important. So this space is pretty simple. It includes pieces like Unloading Alone 1, Unloading Alone 2, Unloading Alone 3, along with Facing the Sea, Two People Unloading, and Collectively Unloading. Because eating is also a way to relax. This room is just a space that makes it easy to space out, to relax a bit.

At first, I thought Gallery 6 would be quite a difficult space to work with. It felt very cramped and narrow. But then I noticed something interesting: right in the middle, there’s this structure that kind of feels like the inside of a nose, like the bridge of a nose. That got me thinking about how our eyes are always looking outward. But if we flipped things and looked at the eye from the inside, the perspective would be completely different. To put it another way, the place we’re in now—or the entire museum—is kind of like a brain, and we’re looking out from inside it. We’re standing inside the eye, looking at this place.

This space also has another layer of meaning to it—it’s about being a hidden observer. So it’s connected to the gaze, or systems of surveillance in society. Actually, I prefer to think of it as like an animal’s eyes, primal and vigilant, like something crouched in a corner, watching. This room has actually gone through a lot of changes. Before, we were actually going to use a lot of eyes, and in the end we changed it to this one eye. On the eye, there are twenty or so animals. We picked a few animals that can make sounds and in the center of the eye there’s a dark space, like a vortex.

For “It Smells Familiar,” we brought together the scents of women across a span of a 100 years, from those born in the 1920s all the way to those born in the 2000s. These women from different eras lived or live in different circumstances. But because they all exist within the broader context of society as a whole, and within a traditional culture, I think that at their core, they are actually quite similar. For example, their tenacity, their kindness, their cowardice—I don’t think these traits, both strengths and weaknesses, have really changed over the past century. So the fragrances had to smell similar, but still capture what makes each time period unique.

For example, the woman born in the 1920s endured poverty. So the olfactory creator used herbal and woody scents, along with the smell of burning paper. Those born in the 1940s and 1950s grew up in wartime, so she used disinfectant and the smell of hospitals as a base note. For the 1960s, she used laundry detergent, and other elements that evoke mass production. The woman born in the 1980s grew up during the transition from a planned economy to a market economy, and then the move from a market economy into the digital economy—she’s part of a generation that has experienced three extremely different eras. The olfactory creator used a mix of richer scents to capture this era: eau de toilette, the smells of beauty salons. In comparison, the generation born after 2000 is a bit more abstract. After all, they’re right at the transition from the Internet age into AI and all kinds of imagined futures. At the same time, they’re the generation that drinks the most Coke, the most coffee, so those smells—coffee beans and cola—were blended together to capture their era.

People often think memory is visual, but I think scent can have a huge impact on us. In this room, all of these smells are mixed together, and what you get is the scent of the “Xiaofang” collective. There’s hardship, poverty, optimism, absurdity, confusion... It’s a tangled, complex scene.

This one’s actually pretty simple. Three curators and artists, including Chen Xiaoyang and Yin Kanbao, started a museum called Yuan Museum, in Leming Village, Conghua, Guangdong. I did a one-month residency there. Everybody would eat meals together, and when we got to the house of a farmer called Sister Ling, we all thought that her rice tasted great. I asked her about it, and she said that she refuses chemical fertilizers, so her rice yield is very low. But it really was delicious. I said, “Wow, Sister Ling, you’re amazing!” Afterwards I thought, I shouldn’t just compliment her, we should actually do something. So I had her take me to her plot of land to have a look. Other people’s fields were totally bare, you could tell they had used herbicide to kill all the weeds. But Sister Ling’s land—because this is Guangzhou after all—was full of green stuff. She told me the green plants were called Golden Pothos, and when spring comes, she just turns over the soil and lets it become natural fertilizer. I was seriously impressed with Sister Ling and I thought, okay, I want to rent a piece of her land. I told her, “You can grow anything you want. Anything is okay with me. If you just want to put some rocks there, that’s okay.” At its core, the piece is about this: in cities, land can only be used for buildings. In the countryside, land can only be used to grow crops. It’s all strictly divided into “agricultural use” and “building plots.” As such, I wanted to free up Sister Ling’s farmland, and let her grow whatever she wants.

She figured, well, I still have to grow something, and decided upon flowers. So her husband began planting flowers for her. These flowers bloomed beautifully, and she started gifting them to other people in the village. She also took some flowers from her plot home, replanting them into Sister Ling’s garden. People in her village had never grown flowers before, because it’s honestly seen as a waste of time. But since then, over the past few years, flowers started growing at seven or eight other households in the village.