Ni Daodao
MA Fine Arts
Rabbonia represents my personal and artistic conceptual universe: a fictional planet where I explore ongoing questions and complexities in my work and broader life. As someone with a sense of dislocation concerning binaries of gender and nationality, I have been on a decade-long search for an authentic identification, seeking to answer questions about selfhood by creating a planet built by, for, and through my work.
On this planet, there are all kinds of strange species living equally: they perhaps resemble certain animals but they cannot be strictly classified. Rather, they adopt a position akin to the marginalized subjects of society, drifting to the outer edge of recognition, splitting off into an independent, self-contained world. The butterfly-like form that populates Rabbonia exists between reality and the virtual, while the rabbit-like creature is a metaphor for a blurring of gendered associations. Each form, each biscuit or wine cork that becomes part of Rabbonia is a unique piece. I draw them on metal or cut them out of paper, tracing their forms by hand and then cover them layer by layer with Urushi, lacquer made from tree resin. As is crucial for my practice, which involves only using sustainable materials, Urushi is a natural resource that has been employed by artisans in China for over seven thousand years, particularly in my home city of Chongqing. Urushi is a means of connecting in the present back to a resource from my childhood, integrating this historical technique with a world of betweenness, a world organized not around constraints, but possibilities.
Creating Rabbonia is how I materialize externally the alternate scape that exists inside me; it is where my artistic project and everyday rituals meet. As the number of creatures increases, this new world evolves with them, and as the world changes, so do the creatures in it, a symbiosis reflecting influences from my gardening and permaculture practices. Like a continuous, flowing dialogue, the cosmology of Rabbonia is a space where I anchor in an imaginary of personal expression and intimacy with nature, transcending social limitations to offer another model of being and creating.