Wo De Nai, Nai
The Breast / The Grandmother
Practice-led Sculptural Research | Queer Embodiment, Feminist Body Politics, and Intergenerational Embodied Experience
Practice-led Sculptural Research | Queer Embodiment, Feminist Body Politics, and Intergenerational Embodied Experience
Xindi Sun, London, UK | 2025
· Investigates how the everyday bodily experiences of elderly East Asian women can offer new perspectives for feminist body politics. The project examines how the ageing body gradually moves beyond sexual desirability, normative femininity, and continuous self-surveillance, forming a different relationship to embodiment. It further proposes that this largely unnamed bodily experience resonates across generations with the de-normative bodily relations actively sought by younger queer subjects.
· Develops a practice-led sculptural inquiry through four life casts of the artist's own breasts. By altering bodily posture and systems of support, gravity is allowed to reshape each cast naturally, transforming them into research objects that can be observed, compared, and discussed. The project investigates how bodily form reconfigures relationships between gender, desire, and embodied experience. The title draws upon the Chinese homonym "nai" (breast) and "nai nai" (grandmother), linking the body, kinship, intergenerational memory, and queer embodiment through linguistic ambiguity.
· Proposes a framework for intergenerational embodied knowledge, reinterpreting the everyday bodily experiences of elderly women—long overlooked within feminist scholarship—as a form of knowledge capable of generating theory. The project contributes a new research pathway for feminist body studies, embodied epistemology, and practice-led research.
· Exhibited in Corpus: Her Embodied Archive at Three Rooms Gallery, London (2026). The project received 664,000 views on Xiaohongshu (RED), generating extensive public discussion on women's bodies, ageing, gender norms, and queer embodiment.
My grandmother sometimes stays at home without wearing a top, and she has never worn a bra when going out.Her appearance is androgynous: short hair, a vest, no bra. At times, to me, she even seemed almost de-gendered.
This was never a gesture, nor a conscious choice, but rather a bodily condition that gradually formed through time, labor, and age. In many East Asian families, this is an extremely common yet rarely spoken everyday reality among older women.
Her body is no longer watched, nor does it require explanation. When a body loses the possibility of being desired, it is paradoxically allowed to exist more freely within the domestic space.This androgyny does not emerge from freedom, but from a kind of forced withdrawal.
As I grew older and began to consciously search for a bodily state that was not centered on gender roles or desire, I started to recognize the origin of this familiarity.What I understand as queer spirit relates to loosening normative structures, rejecting binary systems, and resisting the demand to be seen in a prescribed way.Yet in my childhood memories, I had already encountered a kind of androgynous body that existed not by choice, but as a quiet reality.
In this work, I therefore use my own body as material, creating four body casts in different postures. When the body loses structural support, fat tissue naturally flows, spreads, and droops under the force of gravity.These forms are not corrected, nor are they given symbolic meaning. They are simply preserved as traces of the body in different states.
Through this process, I am not attempting to imitate or reproduce the body of an older woman. Instead, I establish a dialogue between two different moments in time:
one body that has been compelled into a neutral state,
and another that attempts to approach this state voluntarily.
It is within this contrast that I realized I am not alone.
The body does not have to exist solely as an object of desire or regulation. It can also temporarily step outside these frameworks, becoming a state that has not yet been named.