Deliver, With Salt, A Letter to Grandma
by Jia Sheng Lu [Visual Art]
Artist Statement
In “Deliver, With Salt, A Letter To Grandma”, I moved a 60kg bag of salt repeatedly for 13 hours: a gesture that parallels the type of hard labour my grandmother had to endure to support her family during the 1960s in China. With each move of the bag, I wrote a word to my grandmother, altogether forming a letter that recounts a part of her story. Through these performative actions that retrace the experiences of my grandmother, I connect the present with the past, my Canadian upbringing with my Chinese heritage, and attempt to bridge the generational, spacial and language gaps between my grandmother and I.
Jia Sheng Lu is an emerging Chinese Canadian artist based in Toronto. Inspired by his childhood in southern China, his practice is an evolving investigation with value and storytelling through activist performance art rooted in themes of labour and through sculptures created from ideas of exchange and reuse.