"My Mom is a Good German" is the central sentence of an extraordinary story about the efforts to understand and misunderstand and the longing to break this cycle. The ways lead from Taipei and Bonn via Chicago to a village in Georgia of the USA, Jimmy Carter, back to Taipei to finally reach Munich.
The Taiwanese artist Huang Li-Hui (born 1979) tells this story from June 29 in the Apartment of Art.
The story tells us about Ursula (end of the war, fled from the east to the Rhineland), who set off from Bonn to the USA in her teenage years in the 1950s. Ursula meets her American husband and little John is born in the mid-60s. They live as an American model family in Georgia and do everything "right".
In the mid-70s Ursula writes to Jimmy Carter how indignant she is about his unconditional apology to the Vietnamese, because she knows what it means to run away from the communists. Nevertheless: little John has to assure others and sometimes himself again and again: "My Mom is a Good German", because 20 years after the war, in the states, still not everyone really wants to believe.
Change of scene: 40s;Taipei: Ying-wu, father of Li-Hui is born. He grows up as a peasant child under the authoritarian structures of the Chiang Kai-Check regime in Taiwan. During his studies as a teacher, he came into contact with forbidden socialist literature and eventually became a fervent communist. In Taiwan of the 60s and 70s this means: prison, forced labour, torture, etc...... After eight and a half years he is allowed to leave prison and his daughter Li-Hui is born in 1979. Also little Li-Hui, as she grows up, has to make sure to others and sometimes herself that her father is not a bad person just because he was in prison.
Time jump: 2010: Li-Hui comes to Chicago to study art. Li-Hui, now an adult, meets John, now an adult. They become a couple and get married. Ursula meets Li-Hui´s father, Ying-Wu. Naturally sceptical of everything that for him embodies American imperialism, he still tries to be polite and friendly and says: "You Germans are very good . You have Marx and Engels."
......... that sentence will not be translated by Li-Hui.........
Based on her personal paths, on the trials and tribulations of her life, Huang Li-Hui stages and illustrates the complex structures, relationships and boundaries between people in her exhibition "My Mom is a Good German" in the Apartment der Kunst. A parcours of understanding and misunderstanding, of interpretations and misinterpretations.
Within the framework of the exchange program between Taipei and Munich, which is run by the four partners Apartment of Art, Cultural Department of the LH Munich, TAV(Taipei Artist Village ) and Goethe Institut Taipei, Huang Li-Hui spends a three-month residence in the Ebenböckhaus of the city of Munich. The artist is present.
Huang Li-Hui is present at the opening.
