Bone as Backbone: Code-Switching and Linguistic Reorientation
This artistic research project investigates code-switching as an embodied and structural process that occurs during migration and cross-cultural transition. Rather than treating language as a neutral tool of communication, the project approaches language as a system that reorganises bodily habits, gestures, and modes of articulation when one adapts to a new cultural and linguistic environment. The research develops through two interconnected practices: a series of fish-bone writings and an exploration using the guzheng, a traditional Chinese instrument. In the fish-bone works, dried and processed fish bones are arranged into characters that resemble writing but remain unreadable. These asemic forms emerge from the rhythm, spacing, and alignment of the bones themselves. Their illegibility reflects how migrant knowledge and experience can become unreadable within dominant language systems,not due to a lack of meaning, but because they do not conform to established structures of interpretation. In this sense, unreadability functions as a form of resistance as well as a record of displacement. The second component centres on the guzheng, whose movable bridges are function as the backbone of the instrument. Sound is produced and altered through continuous micro-adjustments of these supports. I repeatedly shift the bridges without resolving into a stable tuning system, foregrounding the labour of adjustment rather than musical coherence. This gesture mirrors the back-and-forth process of linguistic adaptation and code-switching, where habitual modes of expression are constantly recalibrated in response to new systems of behaviour, education, and social expectation. This focus on bones is informed by my personal experience of scoliosis and chronic spinal pain, which sharpened my awareness of how deeply structural adjustments are embedded in the body. For me, language functions similarly to a backbone: it supports cultural memory, communication, and continuity, while remaining largely invisible beneath the surface. By focusing on tuning, unreadability, and repetitive adjustment, the project situates language in a suspended state—neither fixed nor fully resolvable—where meaning is negotiated through bodily labour rather than stable articulation.