艺术家：洪梦霞
策展人：许冰煌
策展助理：付思睿
展览时间：2026.02.07 - 04.19
开幕时间：2026.02.07 (周六) 19:00
在现代性的宏大叙事边缘，麻风病不仅是一种由麻风杆菌引起的病理学现象，更是一道被权力深刻划下的社会伤痕。主流视线往往容易将其简化为一个被医学解决的旧问题：一种可以治愈的疾病、一段尘封的公共卫生史、一些散落在地图边缘的院落与村庄。
在彝族毕摩文献的叙事中，麻风（“粗娜西娜”）并非单纯的病理事件。它被解释为来自雷电、彩虹与河水的天罚，也会由蛇与蛙带来。病人眉发脱落，被称作“史奴巴奴”——像蛇、像蛙、像“癞”。[1] “蛇”在这里首先指向禁忌：一种会污染家族、破坏婚配、带来永久排除的恐惧来源。但也同时是一种更复杂的象征：它蛰伏、盘踞，在暗处蜕皮却持续地活着。这种前现代的神秘主义解释，与近代传入的西方细菌学话语、以及殖民主义扩张时期将麻风视为“东亚病夫”与种族退化象征的政治话语，在20世纪的中国大地上产生了一场剧烈的碰撞。[2]
这种碰撞的结果，是长达半个多世纪的现代化隔离政策。[3] 在这个被围墙和偏见围合的暗地里，女性的身体成为了污名化最沉重的场域：她们被视为更具危险的传染源（如明清医书中“过癞”给男性的谬误），[4] 她们的生育被视为对Ta人的不负责任，她们的情感需求被视为一种禁忌的僭越。当我们望向那些散落在华南沿海荒岛、西南深山褶皱中的麻风康复村时，我们看到的不仅仅是历史里的幸存者，更是一个个在被结构机器、公共卫生话语与社会污名重重围困中，依然试图通过肉身突围的女性。
正如展览中湘玉婆婆所言：“我们这种病就像一条蛇一样，这条蛇明明就不会咬人，但是大家都怕，是不是？”
在此，蛇既是外界投射的污名图像，也隐喻着一种女性生命力的图腾。本次洪梦霞在新造空间呈现她的长期项目：《风中草籽》，正是从这种双重性出发：她关注麻风村女性的生命叙事，是被她们在绝境中依然保有的尊严和生命力所触动，试图捕捉那种在身体之间流转的——痛、温柔、愤怒与欲望。本次将展出《风中草籽》系列的三个作品：《河水流过一个世纪》、《阿嬷显灵》与《桃树结果》。
《河水流过一个世纪》| 布面刺绣、照片、彩色影像 | 16'00" | 2026
《河水流过一个世纪》，以刺绣这种充满修补意味的劳作，勾勒了徐和老人近百年生命中的三次分离。河流在这里，既是生命之源，也是不可逾越的冥河。从1939年的卖身救家，到1960年为了养女的生存而斩断亲缘，再到2020年疫情下的临终隔绝，四代女性的命运在宏大的历史震荡中互视。
《阿嬷显灵》| 竹子、棉绳编织、贝母、布料 | 50 cm×150 cm | 2026
《阿嬷显灵》是艺术家通过“梦”对于湘玉本可能拥有的人生的疼惜和回应。对湘玉而言，现实是荒山上残障的身体与孤独，而“梦”是艺术家为她构建夺回主体性的平行世界。艺术家用竹架与编织物重构了湘玉未曾活过的另一种人生：识字、缝纫、婚嫁。
《桃树结果》| 布料、植物拓印、毛毡、旧水果刀、照片 | 280 cm×250 cm | 2026
《桃树结果》，将视线投向了更具原始生命力的西南边陲——在红河州麻风村的彝族邱嬢嬢。在80年代医疗体系缺席的绝境中，这位被麻风村里的人视为“酒疯子”的母亲，在没有任何麻醉与消毒的情况下，用一把普通的水果刀切开阴道生产。这把水果刀留下的伤口，最终成为了母性最暴烈的勋章。
在这三组作品之间，我们看到了一种像“蛇”一样蛰伏在历史暗处的恐惧：它既是彝族叙事中对麻风的恐惧图像，是“不能靠近”的禁忌；也是女性身体在重压中仍保留的生命力——像蛇一样蜕皮、更新。麻风真正顽固的部分从不在细菌学意义上，而在社会学意义上——它是一套长期有效的距离生产机制。它让人群学会退后一步：不靠近、不触摸、不共食、不联姻；它让一个人不仅生病，还被改写为“不洁”、“危险”、“不宜繁衍”的身体。
洪梦霞用布料与手工对抗的，正是这种更日常、更弥散却更不易发觉的暴力。这不仅是关于麻风病康复者的故事，更是关于我们彼此——在面对巨大的不可抗力时，如何用肉身去抵挡、去缝合、去爱、去活下去；在不确定时仍然互相伸出的双手，在陪伴和倾听之后长期的在场，是命运的缠绕，和人与人之间的互相凝望。
文/许冰煌
关于艺术家：洪梦霞
独立写作者与艺术家，出生于广东潮汕乡村。10年来深入走访广东与云南等地的二十多个麻风村，发表非虚构文章十余万字，合著有《沉没的麻风村往事》（微信读书）。她关注遭遇结构性暴力、生命叙事处于边缘地带的群体，曾发起多项跨背景参与式写作项目和麻风村工作坊。
关于策展人：许冰煌
策展人、写作者，现居广州。联合运营“新造空间”。其实践关注社会参与式艺术、生态政治、民间记忆与替代性教育。她将策展视为一种回应社会结构与历史创伤的方法，试图在断裂中，通过艺术行动重建人与人之间具体的连接与在场。其近期研究获荷兰克劳斯亲王基金会（Prince Claus Fund）及英国文化教育协会（British Council）支持。
注：
[1] 蔡富莲：《凉山彝族毕摩文献〈疟责哈姆尼〉与彝族对瘟疫的认识》，《 宗教学研究》，2014年。
[2] 周东华：《19世纪下半叶“麻风中国佬”污名的建构》，《历史研究》，2025年。
[3] 实际上，早在16世纪时，这片土地便开始将“隔离”作为方法去处理麻风病人。详见“16世纪后的中国文献资料，把麻风描述成偏僻南方的不治之症，通过身体接触或遗传传播，这和近代早期的欧洲麻风病模式有明显的相通之处。地方政府甚至采取隔离的非常之举，建立对早期的西方传教士而言，似乎非常熟悉的麻风病院。”梁其姿著，朱慧颖译：《麻风：一种疾病的医疗社会史》，北京：商务印书馆，2013年。
[4] 同上。
Artist: Hong Mengxia
Curator: Xu Binghuang
Curatorial Assistant: Fu Sirui
Duration: 2026.02.07 - 04.19
Opening: 2026.02.07 (Sat) 19:00
At the margins of the grand narrative of modernity, leprosy is not merely a pathological condition caused by Mycobacterium leprae; it is a social wound deeply inscribed by power. Mainstream perspectives often simplify it into an obsolete problem solved by medicine: a curable disease, a sealed chapter of public health history, or scattered compounds and villages fading at the edges of the map.
However, in the narratives of the Yi people's Bimo scriptures (indigenous ritual texts), leprosy, known as "Cunasina", is never just a pathological event. It is interpreted as a heavenly punishment that arrives through thunder, rainbows, and riverwater, or is brought by snakes and frogs. Those who lose their eyebrows and hair are referred to as "Shinu Banu", a term that figures the snake (Shinu), the frog (Banu) as "leprous". [1] Here, the "Serpent" first names a taboo: a source of fear believed to pollute the kinship, destroy marriage prospects, and lead to permanent exclusion. Yet, the serpent is simultaneously a complex symbol: it lies low, coils, and molts in the dark, persisting in life. Across twentieth-century China, this pre-modern mystical interpretation collided violently with the Western bacteriological discourse imported in the modern era, as well as the political rhetoric during the era of colonial expansion that racialised leprosy as a symbol of the Sick Man of East Asia and racial degeneration. [2]
The result of this collision was a modernised isolation policy that lasted for more than half a century .[3] Within spaces enclosed by walls and prejudice, the female body became the site of the heaviest stigmatisation. Women were viewed as more dangerous sources of contagion, echoing the specific Chinese medical fallacy of "Guo Lai" , the belief that a woman could cure herself by passing the disease to a man through sex.[4] Their reproduction was deemed irresponsible to others, and their emotional needs were treated as an indecent taboo. When we look towards those leprosy recovery villages scattered across the desolate islands of South China, or folded deep into the mountains of the Southwest, we are not only facing survivors of history. We are meeting women who, surrounded by state machinery, public-health discourse, and everyday stigma, still try, through their own flesh, to push back against a life that demands disappearance.
As Granny Xiangyu says : Our illness is like a snake. The snake clearly won’t bite, but everyone is afraid, isn't that so?
In this context, the snake is both an image of stigma projected from the outside and a totem of female life-force. This exhibition at Making Space presents Hong Mengxia's long-term project, Seeds in the Wind, which begins precisely from this doubleness. Drawn to the duality and vitality of these women in leprosy villages, Hong does not approach them as pitiable victims or spectacles of suffering, but to capture what flows between bodies, pain, tenderness, anger, and desire. The exhibition brings together three works from the Seeds in the Wind: Flowing Through Time, The Local Deity and the Snake in Xiangyu's Dream, and Peach Trees Bear Fruit.
Flowing Through Time | embroidery on fabric, photos, color video | 16'00" | 2026
Flowing Through Time employs embroidery, labour marked by mending implications, to outline three separations in the nearly century-long life of Xu He. The river here holds a dual mythological significance: it is both the source of life and the impassable River Styx. From selling herself to save her family in 1939, to severing kinship ties in 1960 so an adopted daughter might survive, to the final isolation at life’s end during the pandemic in 2020, four generations of women gaze back at one another across the tremors of history.
The local Deity and Snake in Xiangyu's Dream | bamboo, cotton thread, mother-of-pearl, fabric | 50 cm×150 cm | 2026 | 16'00" | 2026
The Local Deity and the Snake in Xiangyu's Dream constructs a parallel world through a "dream", the artist responds with care and tenderness to the life that Xiangyu might have lived. For Xiangyu, reality is the disabled body and isolation lodged in barren hillsides, while the "dream" constitutes a parallel world constructed by the artist, one in which Xiangyu reclaims her subjecthood. The artist reconstructs an unlived life for Xiangyu using bamboo frames and weaving: literacy, sewing, and marriage, things withheld not only by illness, but by the long social shadow that illness casts.
Peach Trees Bear Fruit | fabric, botanical rubbing, felt, old fruit knife), photos | 280 cm×250 cm | 2026
Peach Trees Bear Fruit turns its gaze to the more primal vitality of China’s southwestern borderlands, focusing on Granny Qiu, a woman in the narratives of the Yi and in a leprosy village in Honghe Prefecture. In the 1980s, when medical care was absent, this mother, regarded as a "crazy drunk woman" by villagers, with a small fruit knife, cut open her own vaginal opening to give birth, without anaesthesia or disinfection. The wound left becomes the most brutal medal of motherhood.
Between these threeworks, we see a fear crouching in the historical darkness like a "serpent". It is the image of dread of leprosy in Yi narratives, the taboo of "do not approach". It is also the vitality retained by the female body under immense pressure, molting, renewing like a snake. The truly intractable part of leprosy has never been biological, but sociological, it is a long-standing mechanism for generating distance. It makes people learn to step back: no approaching, no touching, no sharing food, no marrying; It makes a person not only ill, but rewritten as a body that is unclean , dangerous, and unfit to reproduce .
What Hong Mengxia confronts through fabric and handwork is precisely this everyday, diffused violence—subtle, pervasive, and difficult to name. This exhibition is not merely a testimony of leprosy rehabilitation survivors, but also about us all, how we use our bodies to resist, to stitch, to love, and to survive in the face of overwhelming forces; how we extend our hands to one another in uncertainty, and how long-term presence, after companionship and listening, these are the knots of fate, and the mutual gaze.
By Xu Binghuang
About Artist: Hong Mengxia
An independent writer and artist, she was born in a rural area of Chaoshan, Guangdong.Over the past decade, she has conducted long-term fieldwork across more than twenty leprosy villages in Guangdong, Yunnan, and beyond, publishing over 100,000 words of nonfiction writing and co-authoring Sinking Memories of Leprosy Villages and can be read on the WeChat Reading platform. Her practice focuses on communities shaped by structural violence and life narratives pushed to the margins. She has initiated multiple cross-background participatory writing projects and workshops in leprosy villages.
About Curator: Xu Binghuang
Works as a curator and writer based in Guangzhou, where she co-runs Making Space. Her practice focuses on participatory art, ecological politics, folk memory, and alternative education. She regards curating as a method to respond to social structures and historical traumas, seeking to reconstruct concrete connections and presence among people amidst ruptures through artistic action. Her recent research has been supported by the Prince Claus Fund (Netherlands) and the British Council (UK).