'Women’s Work | Women’s Play'

女性的工作/女性的游戏

KIMVI & Women Villager's performative participation

Hand made traditional Roof tiles

Nanxi South Village, Huangshan City

China

2023

In her permanent installation ‘Women’s Work | Women’s Play’ , the artist transforms the vernacular architecture of Nanxi South Village using only discarded traditional roof tiles. Working alone under intense heat, she painstakingly stacks these salvaged materials into a solid, mountainous structure that echoes both the surrounding landscape and local methods of storing and stacking tiles.

Shaping these heavy, utilitarian objects into a woman’s skirt is a deliberate meditation on domestic labour, cultural memory, and feminine identity. In traditional Chinese architecture, the roof tile signifies shelter and patriarchal lineage; it is both weighty and enduring. Re-formed as a skirt—a garment tied to femininity, grace, and domesticity—the tiles become a potent metaphor for women’s invisible labour and quiet strength. What once protected a home now becomes an imposing protective garment, suggesting that a community is sustained not only by its buildings but by the often-unrecognised “women’s work” that holds it together.

Blending sculpture and performance, the artist completes the piece by standing directly behind the stacked tiles, creating the striking illusion that she is wearing the installation as a skirt. In this gesture, she embodies the work’s concept, becoming a living monument to generations of women whose daily physical labour is woven into the village’s fabric. She also invites local women to engage playfully with the artwork; their participation brings dynamism and life to the form.

Part of artist- in -residence in Nanxi South Village in Huangshan City, China as part of the Rural Summer Art Season - Organised by the Tunxi District People’s Government and Shanghai Lanzhen Cultural Tourism Group.