The choice of whether or not to have children is increasingly fraught for many who are concerned about resisting societal pressures and limiting the human effect on the planet.
This choice is what the art installation “Let’s Make a Baby!” conveys. The installation at Gallery 1010 within the Emporium Center on Gay Street was created by Danqi Cai, a second year MFA student at the University of Tennessee.
The art on display primarily focused on a video of Cai and her husband sculpting a clay child. After they create the sculpture, they swaddle, read bedtime stories and sing lullabies to the sculpture, all while footage of natural disasters are superimposed on the video.
Five of seven sculptures created were on display, positioned as if they were watching the video of their creation from a projector propped up with children’s books. They casted silhouettes on the video because of the projector, as if they were in a crowded theater.
The other art on display included prints from the video, the main one of which were two frames from the video cut in an alternating pattern with each column showing part of the frame. The other prints were pieces of collage art. Along with the collages, cutouts from those works were placed in evidence bags and tacked to the wall. These bags surrounded the room.
Two shelves were also on display, both filled with different books. The top shelf had fairy and folk tale books, and the bottom shelf contained books on humanity, choice and population.
Finally, two more projectors played four animated collages. Sound accompanied the animations through headphones, replicating birds, breathing and nature. The animations included various elements, like religious, familial and natural imagery.
Cai discussed the art installation and what inspired its creation, starting back during the summer of 2021.
“It kind of started with an impulse to describe me and my husband’s love and care towards our children who will never exist,” Cai said. “It’s a conscious decision to not have biological children. But in the past and talking about it with people, I realized that it’s very hard to frame it as an emotion of love and care, because there’s no entity to receive that care. So, we wanted to make a video of literally us making a baby out of clay together.”
She talked about the video further, saying that it correlates to the ideas of creation in religion. She cited Islam, Christianity and Chinese mythology as part of her influence with the usage of clay for the sculptures.
She talked about what pushed her into creating the installation. Primarily, she talked about how Art Professor Emily Bivens helped her towards this goal.
“She really encouraged me at the end of last semester to think of my video specifically as an installation, drawing from theatre theory … about having the pieces more like sightlines,” Cai said. “The viewer comes in, what do they see first, what do they see second?”
“And the way that she described it, the pieces are different words in the same sentence,” Cai said. “So they’re not the same, but they each contribute to the understanding of the broader concept.”
Cai hopes that people will engage with the installation and take away the thoughts and feelings that she put forth in her art.
“I hope people would think more about procreation as a choice and not something that is expected of them, because I feel like it’s one of those things that is so embedded in our culture … because it’s so related to our survival that we don’t see it as a choice or something that we don’t necessarily have to do,” Cai said.
She said that she is working on her artist’s statement of the installation, but she hopes that people will take away meaning from the pieces.
“I hope to plant a feeling of wrongness that could later blossom into a rethinking of procreative norms and expectations,” Cai said.
Cai’s friend and fellow artist Lisa Mullikin was among the crowd at the gallery Friday night. The pair met when Cai was a teacher’s assistant at UT and Mullikin talked about her reaction to seeing the installation.
“I have known Danqi for the past year, and it’s just amazing how varied it is and all the different mediums, and it’s really impressive,” Mullikin said. “Now, I’m just overwhelmed by art. It’s so beautiful.”
“Let’s Make a Baby!” will still be available to view on Saturday, Feb. 5 at the Emporium Center. After that, the installation will be closed, but Cai said that those interested in viewing it on Sunday, Feb. 6 can message or email her.
Cai’s Instagram @danqicai has a link to her website where you can message her about the installation.
In her art installation "Let's Make a Baby!" 2nd-year MFA student Danqi Cai displayed a video of her and her husband creating and caring for clay children, representatives of the children they have decided not to have.
