Speaking to Nobody is an artistic research and practice project that I began in 2023. Within this project, my mother and I collaboratively created a fictional character named “Changli Cui,” based on family archives and our shared imagination. “Cui” is the surname of my mother’s family, and the face of “Cui” is a composite of my mother, her sister, and me. “Cui” is us, and yet more than us. Through multiple media, including image, writing, body, and ritual, I tried to weave a Sci-Fi of a matriarchal society.

This project is both a response to and a further exploration of my ongoing research on ethnic minority feminism. Within the dense, vast, and intricate structures of patriarchy, ethnic minority females are often entangled through marriage and familial relationships, subtly participating in the reproduction and reinforcement of the system. In response, I employ a fictional identity as a conversational intermediary—wandering between archives and imaginations—to explore the nonlinear, embodied mode of knowledge production that resists and transcends patriarchal narratives. At the same time, I hope this can serve as a starting point for envisioning alternative ways of living and other future possibilities centred on matriarchal principles.