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Originally meaning “mountain village”, “shanzhai” has evolved into a synonym for “imitation” in modern Chinese.
It symbolizes a marginal, unauthorized existence and implies a kind of creativity generated in the system of the other.
In this work, the cat is sculpted in butter, then slowly cut and stacked until the image disintegrates, finally forming a soft, unrecoverable hill.
The lucky cat, a mascot simplified as an “oriental symbol”, is consumed and misinterpreted in Western culture, just as we, in a foreign culture, gradually lose the outline of ourselves in imitation.
This is not a destruction, but a slippery and irreversible process of identity reorganization.
The pile of buttered debris is no longer a fortune cat, nor does it have to be anything else - it is simply “becoming”.
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