WANRONG ZHU

During my fieldwork in Xingmeng, Yunnan, an elder taught me to say “I’m beautiful” in Kachuo. Through listening, repetition and correction, this simple exchange became an intimate encounter with language as lived knowledge: carried by a voice, learned through the body, and sustained through the attention one person gives another.

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In Na-Nuo Tou Ya, I reimagine myself as a speculative future body within this encounter. Although my appearance has changed, I remain a learner, dependent on the elder’s knowledge and willingness to share it. This imagined body brings different temporalities into the same scene, asking how inherited knowledge might inhabit forms of life that we cannot yet fully recognise.

The phrase “I’m beautiful” also becomes an act of self-recognition mediated by another person’s language. Spoken through an unfamiliar body, it opens questions about how identity and belonging are formed through cultural relationships, and how those relationships might persist as bodies and their surrounding worlds change.

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The work locates the possibility of cultural continuity in the everyday practice of transmission. Its imagined future begins with a small gesture in the present: someone speaks, someone listens, and a phrase is spoken again.