Mocube is honoured to present Dai Chenlian's latest exhibition Waxing and Waning of the Augustness II. Showcasing the second part of 'Mother Trilogy' including drawings and performance. The exhibition will run until the 18th of September 2022.

The title "Waxing and Waning of the Augustness" is inspired by the poem One Piece by Li Shangyin, a poet in the Tang Dynasty. Like the fragrance of sweet-scented osmanthus, like the moon shining in a mirror (the artist's mother was born in the eighth month of the lunar calendar, when osmanthus flowers were in blossom), although time and space are staggered, this poem is a historical coincidence and also implies the fate of women from ancient times to the present.

Drawing, as the thread running through the exhibition, revolves around the script of the performance Twenty Poems for Mom, which originates from the artist's memory and association of his mother and himself, consisting of twenty performance poems with respect to performance studies that focus on memory, time and duration.

The artist uses an old portrait as the starting point of the narrative. The work overlaps and combines the elves in nature and the mother's painful past experiences. In such a way, the theme of the poem, as a metaphor, connects the struggles and memories of Chinese women. Performance is used to record reality, reproduce or make up magnificent sceneries, blurring the characters and the chaotic voices, switching freely between performance documentary aesthetics, mysticism, and home theater. The work describes the dilemma of the artist's mother in the family relationship (the half-uncle burned the only portrait of the artist's grandfather), which brings out the eternal love and shadow of the family, mother and child, wandering between psychological reality and physical reality. This kind of wandering is not only the transition of the bond between the mother and the son, the endless longing between the mother and the grandfather, but also the mythological scene of the current era of China. It is strong and real, and full of illusions.