Litchi Girl (荔枝姑娘). Mao Chenyu (毛晨雨). Multi-media. 2018.Mao Chenyu is an artist, documentary filmmak

Litchi Girl (荔枝姑娘). Mao Chenyu (毛晨雨). Multi-media. 2018.

Mao Chenyu is an artist, documentary filmmaker, researcher and rice farmer born in Hunan and based in Shanghai, China. Trained in the study of inorganic non-metallic materials, Mao founds and runs Paddy Film Farm, a grassroots independent film studio and producer of organic rice and strong liquor. As such, he has spent over a decade producing “ethnographically inflected documentary work” in a village outside of Yueyang in Hunan. Mao has participated in multiple solo exhibitions and group exhibitions since 2015, and their films have won awards in the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and Yunnan Multiculture Visual Festival.

Litchi Girl is Mao’s first solo exhibition and concerns the “contradictions between white and black spaces”. Mao uses green to resist both white and black discourses, mimicking the green screen technique of cinematic production. Viewers of the exhibition are left searching for the absent Litchi Girl throughout the exhibition, as the only footnote appears in the video Memory that Self Vanishes with 2/3 Speed of Light, which mentions that “In 1967 ‘Litchi Girl’ escaped a labor camp guarded by men, and jumped into the river. Several days later her body was found at the river mouth near Dongting Lake, her breasts already swollen”.

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