dudu: The Voice of Ghostbirds

Project Lai is honored to present The Voice of Ghostbirds, a solo exhibition by Du Wenting (dudu), in collaboration with J7 ART. We invited ORIFICO®STUDIO to design the exhibition furniture, bringing a reading scene into the gallery space and giving voices a brand-new habitat to settle in. The exhibition will run from May 24 through June 30.

Big Book, a series of “diaries” that began with a comma on August 11, 2020 and continued for approximately 200 days, is the starting point of this exhibition. Eight books in total, their size and material differ from ordinary notebooks; when one flips through them, the pages make a rustling sound, says dudu. Facing a stack of pre-bound pages, she pours herself into them, and the pages receive every form of her artistic practice, experiment, and documentation. It is a game she has known since childhood – one with simple rules that allow her to play freely. As time passes, the pages thicken and store her ceaseless monologue: the exuberant or the honestly low, the unexpected, mistaken, bad tastes. Every form of her expressions is admitted and accommodated by Big Book, pausing at just the right moment before too much rhetoric arrives.

With each book completed, dudu records many arrangements of sentences and combinations of words. Without any causal relationship between them, these words represent her feelings for their textures. This same sensibility carries into her paintings: no explanation, no inference, no hierarchy established. The things within a picture simply exist, drawn close to one another, nothing more. Narrative happens wherever there is color and line, and the way Big Book is organized resembles an improvisation that repeats itself day after day, which later developed into a lighter, everyday habit of sketching.

We will present dudu’s works parallel to her Big Book series, building up an exhibition space composed of paper, wooden panels, collage, painting, and reading furniture – closer to dudu’s daily practice full of contradiction and tangled feelings. On one side, a near-obsessive collecting, observing, and recording of shapes, colors, sentences, sounds, and even a certain quality of abstract thought; on the other, an absorption of reality through material and emotion, and then its alteration and return. In the forest, dudu loses her horse, discovers a stone and devotes herself to a side quest for pleasure; at the backyard of her house, she creates a green passage that holds no secrets; at the glowing, trembling lakeside, she peers through a telescope at an unknown distance – there, she sees the long, slender shadows of three women and an enormous fly.

So then, how to build an appropriate site of reading for dudu's Big Book series? They need to be opened. They need hands and a reason to stop by.

ORIFICO®STUDIO has designed port_4_lio for this exhibition. It is not an off-the-shelf display system, but a new object designed specifically for Big Book, this space, and this particular way of reading and viewing. Drawing from the physical dimensions of the artist books and the gestures of turning pages, ORIFICO®STUDIO developed three distinct table forms, each with the same height yet distinctive structures to accommodate different body postures and rhythms of staying: pausing briefly at the edge, alternating between upper and lower volumes by hand, or browsing each page slowly with the aid of other visual references on the side. Distributed throughout the gallery alongside mobile structures, port_4_lio composes a temporary reading room, where it is permitted to remain – a habitat where ghostbirds can disguise themselves and release their voices.

Through this collaboration, Project Lai hopes to offer visitors a new experience of reading and viewing. No prior understanding is required. Simply turn a page, let this gesture be the beginning, and then enter the forest of ghostbirds.