“An ‘idyll’ is a representation of humanity’s longing for a simple, pure and good life. But when one person’s ‘idyll’ rubs up against another, the good life can disappear. 

In 2017, Li Mingyang and her friend Teresa took a room in a shared house, with three other families, all coming from different backgrounds, occupations and values, sharing a kitchen and a bathroom. Inevitably, a series of conflicts, resource scrambles, mutual discontent and superficial hypocrisy began to occur. Mingyang realized that the sphere of innocence and goodness belongs only to the small range of things within an individual’s control. When this small scope gradually expands, innocence disappears. Just like the hair of all her different housemates, collecting in the plughole of the shared bath, they were glued with soap bubbles and no one would clean them. Mingyang was the only one to take them out everyday. 

For this project, Mingyang created two pieces of jewellery: a necklace with a series of hair-balls and a box brooch made from hair. The necklace is chained with the hair of strangers, drawn from plugholes. The necklace symbolises the bathroom of Mingyang’s shared house whilst the box, containing clippings of Mingyang and Teresa’s hair, is closed off to the world, a private memory.