Eighteen installations have been shown worldwide under this title since 1993. The surface she creates, when seen from a distance, resembles the regular squared patterns of memorial inscriptions typical of the Han and Six Dynasties. Her concern for familial relationships is a common one for Chinese women artists of her generation, but obscuring its meaning in this way is unusual. Shengtian Zheng's work is about intercultural dialogue. In addition to his artistic career, Zheng has served in important teaching and administrative posts over the past two decades, for which he has negotiated, organized, and interpreted cultural exchanges.
Intercultural contact is now both common and necessary.
It is an exciting but sometime very frustrating process, because people always misread and misunderstand others, or are misread and misunderstood by others. All must suffer this mutual misrecognition in order to keep a hope of being recognized someday. Greenberg was one of several Western scholars introduced to China when the door first opened in the 1980s, after several decades of isolation. The illegibility of the writing mirrors the seeming opacity of the translated discourse. Despite his idealism, Zheng reflects on the difficulties and even failure of his ongoing efforts at cultural translation.