In November 2023, Li Xinmo participated in the Vienna Art Week, where she exhibited a section of her art project WOYESHI and performed the performance piece The Mirror Story.
WOYESHI is an art project about sexual assault initiated by Li Xinmo, who recruited participants who were victims of sexual assault to take part in the project. Through performance theatre performances, art-making workshops and sharing sessions, Li Xinmo allows these victims to try to express themselves in an artistic way and to be seen by a wider audience.
The exhibition space for Art Week is a private living space that includes a hallway, kitchen and two bedrooms. Li Xinmo chose paintings by one of the participants in the WOYESHI project, which were posted in the entrance hallway as well as in the kitchen. The author of these paintings is Deer Flat, who was sexually abused by her father from the age of two until she was 14. She developed schizophrenia as an adult and expressed herself in paintings while undergoing treatment. In these self-portraits and children's portraits, we can feel the intense childhood trauma and the despairing mental world of repression.
Related to these paintings, in another bedroom, Li Xinmu performs a performance piece related to sexual abuse, The Mirror Story. In the centre of the room is a mattress, above which hangs a red veil. Li Xinmo used red ink (cinnabar ink) to write many ‘pain’ characters on the red yarn and the mattress, and interspersed with these pain characters are some sentences related to pain, which are taken from ancient Chinese inscriptions. For example, Wang Xizhi's ‘Mourning and Chaos Post’ has the words ‘pain through the heart and liver, what can be done about the pain’, and Wang Xizhi's ‘Auntie's Post’ has the words ‘grief and pain destroys the skin’. I wrote these characters in traditional Chinese. These words related to ‘pain’ evoke the feeling of pain in the body and memory at the same time.
Li Xinmo hangs red balloons filled with water on her body, which symbolise the womb and the egg. She pokes these water-filled balloons one by one with a needle, and the water spills onto the mattress, merging with the red words on the mattress, which then blur and turn into red ‘blood’. Standing in the ‘pool of blood’ on the mattress, Li Xinmo broke a round mirror. She kneels over the fragments, puts the picked-up pieces of the mirror in her mouth, and recounts an experience of sexual assault. The round mirror symbolises integrity, while the broken mirror is a metaphor for a broken childhood and a broken life. Li Xinmo puts the pieces of mirror into her mouth to tell an experience of sexual assault, expressing that it is difficult to tell this experience, and the process of telling is painful, difficult and ambiguous due to the obstruction of the pieces of mirror. This work reveals the plight and pain of those who have been sexually assaulted.
