Hua Lou
Clay, spray paint, resin, clay, smushed bananas, fluorescent powder, fluorescent clay, color, liquid pigment, wires, paper pulp, paper, PVC board
4m*0.33m*0.33m 2022
The Mosuo people represent the only surviving matriarchal ethnic group in China. Within this culture, long-term romantic partnerships do not lead to the formation of independent nuclear families. Individuals reside with their maternal relatives for life. Men visit women at night and return to their matrilineal households in the morning. This arrangement involves no structural financial ties, relying instead on ritualistic exchanges. Children born from these unions remain within the mother's family.
Externally termed the "walking marriage," this system has been widely eroticized by the dominant Han Chinese discourse. It is frequently misconstrued as a sanctioned form of casual sexual encounters. This exoticized framing has deeply penetrated the tourism industry, reducing a complex kinship system to a commodity of sexual fantasy.
This cultural distortion manifests visibly in the local tourist landscape. Traditional architectural and natural symbols are consistently re-coded with erotic connotations. The "Hua Lou," historically the private chamber of a Mosuo woman within the maternal home, shares a homophone in Han literary history with ancient brothels. Tourism businesses exploit this ambiguity, naming inns after historical brothels and utilizing suggestive pink lighting to satisfy outsiders' voyeuristic expectations. Similarly, the Ottelia acuminata, a native aquatic flower of Lugu Lake, is marketed using Chinese idioms that imply feminine promiscuity, projecting external anxieties regarding polygamy onto Mosuo women.
This manufactured imagination fuels a toxic dynamic of mutual harassment in the tourism zone. Driven by the myth of boundless sexual freedom, male tourists routinely subject Mosuo women to sexual harassment. Conversely, female tourists arriving with idealized expectations of matriarchal gender equality frequently experience harassment from local men, who operating under market-driven assumptions, perceive these visitors as outsiders seeking casual encounters. The commodification of the walking marriage ultimately transforms a structured matriarchal tradition into a space governed by the dynamics of the colonialist and patriarchal gaze.