Transmedia artist, researcher and Assistant Professor Feixue Mei reimagines the myth of Mulan as a visual inquiry into the lives of women from China’s post-one-child-policy generation, exploring the double-bind between professional achievement and domestic tradition through hybrid physical and digital storytelling.
The myth of Mulan has always been about performance: a woman who takes on a role not assigned to her, succeeds, and is eventually revealed. Feixue Mei is interested in what that myth means for a generation of women who were not performing to deceive anyone, but simply trying to navigate an impossible set of contradictions with no script that fit.
The Life of Contemporary Mulan is a visual research project rooted in the Only-Daughter phenomenon of post-socialist China, where the one-child policy created a generation of women raised as sole carriers of family legacy. These women face what Mei describes as a double-bind: the expectation to achieve professional success, a role historically coded masculine, while simultaneously upholding traditional domestic virtues. Neither script is comfortable. Neither can be abandoned.
“I view the myth of Mulan not as a fixed historical record, but as a living palimpsest,” Mei says. “For the post-one-child generation, identity is a constant performance, a delicate act of navigating the space between the weight of ancestral legacy and the fluid possibilities of a contemporary, globalized self.”
The project investigates this friction through a hybrid of physical and digital storytelling, treating identity as something co-produced through cultural performance and material practice. Mei’s broader practice as founder of Boundless Bound Publishing sits at the intersection of what she calls the algorithmic and the ancestral, integrating hand-coded digital environments with tangible publishing to explore how identities are constructed and transmitted. Printing, in her work, is understood as a generative ritual that mediates between traditional restraint and digital chaos.
Feixue Mei is a transmedia artist, researcher and Assistant Professor at James Madison University, and founder of Boundless Bound Publishing. Her work has been exhibited at Palazzo Bembo and the LA Art Book Fair and is held in collections at RISD and Printed Matter.
Website: feixuemei.info Instagram: @feixuefeixue
The Life of Contemporary Mulan. Hybrid physical and digital visual research project. All images: Feixue Mei.
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