Date of Award
Spring 5-7-2025
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art
Degree Type
Thesis
Abstract
My thesis project, Undefinitive, examines the cyclical process of destruction, transformation, and rebirth through installation, ceramics, and text. With a deep unease toward my own gendered body, I investigate how vulnerability, both physical and psychological, can become a site of resistance and empowerment. Drawing from feminist theory, Chinese mythology, and stream-of-consciousness narratives, my work explores the monstrous and the fragmented as inseparable states of one’s becoming. Through references to body art, speculative fiction, and queer theory, I reimagine femininity and queerness as forces capable of dismantaling societal structure and forging new modes of existence.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world where consciousness inhabits non-human forms, Undefinitive tells a queer love story between a moth and an orchid at the dusk of the human era. Using text as the foundation for worldbuilding, I construct a fragmented installation where ceramic sculptures and video projections evoke fictional histories that resist linearity and definition. By inhabiting the in-between space of human and non-human, body and mind, I explore how gender, love, and identity might persist beyond the collapse of traditional binaries. In doing so, I seek to envision a new ontology rooted in fragmentation, transformation, and queer affinity.
Language
English
Program Chair
Tiffany Calvert
Thesis Text Advisor
Heather Bennett
Thesis Text Advisor
Monika Weiss
Faculty Mentor
Heather Bennett
Committee Member
Heather Bennett
Committee Member
Monika Weiss
Committee Member
Erin Johnston
Recommended Citation
Mu, Lan, "Undefinitive" (2025). MFA in Visual Art. 32.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/mfa_visual_art/32
Included in
Art and Design Commons, Fiction Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Queer Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Artist's Statement
Perhaps we could all disappear like this. Bones, hair, flesh—discard the torment of the body and the anguish of the mind, and cast aside those thick, sinister emotions. Let the world become simple and clear once more. Born at dawn, absorbing sunlight and nourishment, growing, blooming, and bearing fruit, dying at dusk, and sleeping in darkness. Let bewildered humanity abandon those meaningless memories, ceaseless bodily pain, and erratic wars. Let floods submerge cities, villages, tribes, and all human-made creations. Allow me to press the button that resets the world.
They ask you this question at the mental health hospital. If there is a button that would make you disappear instantly from the world, would you press it now? I know that question is asked to detect suicidal ideations, a mere hypothesis, yet my mind keeps going back to it, pondering on it. It is the abyss, the ultimate thought experiment, a philosophical trap, an irresistible possibility.
My work begins from the edge of the abyss. Through installation, ceramics, and text, I investigate the cycle of destruction and rebirth, personal and collective trauma, and the fragmentation of the body and the self. I draw from feminist theory, Chinese mythology, and stream-of-conscious narratives to reimagine gender, love, consciousness, and identity.
I think about how humanity will go extinct. maybe an asteroid hit Earth; maybe aliens invaded us; maybe we targeted nukes at each other; maybe natural disasters tried to cleanse us off the planet…Or maybe, someone decided to push a button that extinguished humanity in a snap. An unsatisfied, cynical woman who hates her body, and everyone else’s. Whose mind often drifts out of her physicality, amazed and confused by the fact that she can control her limbs. Who wonders why she cannot be a conscious tin can, empty and lying on the grass. Who hates the fact that she is a woman at all and using a pronoun. Who cannot seem to comprehend the meaning of words like gender or love or existence.
When I take out “men”, “women” becomes undefined. Nature. Without society it becomes undefined, too. Love. Yet heterosexuality is gone. Without body sex is gone, too. So, what is left? Feelings and emotions, and a prolonged sense of a joyful misfit. Queerness.
I named the installation Undefinitive in the hope of capturing and preserving these fragments of fictional history that are unable to be defined by our language. In this archive of objects, there are ceramic sculptures of mummified human brains, weathered, deteriorated, and unrecognizable. There are tree branches, holding clusters of silkworm cocoons. There are enigmatic objects that suggest reverence and ritual.
There are two characters in my story. The “I”, who became a moth. They are my doppelgangers. They flew past the apocalypse into the ocean of dreams. In the forest of consciousness, they met the “She”, a wild moth orchid, shining high up in the air. To be more accurate, I would use the word affinity to describe the emotional and spiritual connection between the two characters. They cannot be seen directly in the work. They exist as phantoms. Their contours and physicality are disrupted by their fragmented state of being, as their relationship is also fractured and bodiless. It is impossible to see them in entirety. I see their presence reflected in a collection of objects, and more.