Since 2005, Tao Aimin has created a series of works from wooden washboards that she has collected in the hundreds on repeated visits to the countryside. They have been fractured and deformed by repeated and prolonged exposure to the elements. Once household necessities, they have been now largely supplanted with modern technology, a fate shared by the culture of the women who used them. For the artist, these washboards are the only material evidence of the women’s toil: “I am concerned with the circumstances of women in different eras. Washboards—these ‘artifacts’ submerged for years in water—are symbols of the women of a different time, a river of life witnessed by countless women in history.”

In “Washed Relics” (2006), she strings the washboards together with fishing lines into wall-size suspended displays that recall archaeological relics and anthropological specimens in museums. Constituted by mundane and personal objects of anonymous women, these installations are counterpoints to the monumental and universalizing estrangements of language and culture by contemporary male artists, most notably Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky series.