Touchable Letters
Practice-led Installation & Participatory Research | Feminist Testimony, Ethics of Representation, and Cross-cultural Knowledge Production
Practice-led Installation & Participatory Research | Feminist Testimony, Ethics of Representation, and Cross-cultural Knowledge Production
Xindi Sun, China | 2025
· Investigates how marginalised embodied experiences can enter public feminist discourse without reducing women's suffering to spectacle. Situated within the context of inadequate sex education in China, the project examines how personal testimony can be transformed into public knowledge while preserving the dignity, complexity, and agency of lived experience.
· Establishes an anonymous testimonial archive consisting of 35 handwritten letters from Chinese women aged 16–72. Reappropriating tracing paper, a material traditionally used in architectural drawing, the project exploits its layered translucency to transform an architectural working material into a participatory research methodology. Visitors gradually reveal and read overlapping handwritten letters through touch, making bodily engagement central to encountering the archive while preserving the irreducible opacity of lived experience. Understanding is therefore framed as a continual process of approaching another's experience rather than fully possessing or comprehending it.
· Combining testimonial collection, tactile interaction, bilingual Chinese–English translation, and sound installation, the project investigates how embodied experience is transmitted, negotiated, and understood across different media, languages, and cultural contexts. It further proposes a practice-based methodology for the ethics of representing lived experience by constructing a participatory mode of knowledge production between the visible and the invisible, enabling women's experiences to enter public discourse without being consumed as spectacles of suffering.
· Exhibited across the United Kingdom, France, and China, including Palimpsest (hARTslane Gallery, London), Her Element in Art (Levant Art, Shanghai), and the China Sex Museum (2025–26). The project has received over 5.65 million online views and has generated more than 50 additional anonymous letters, continuing to evolve as an expanding participatory research archive.
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