I am one of China’s 66.93 million left-behind children.

This project begins with a personal history shaped by absence — of parents, of emotional recognition, of institutional care. Like millions of rural children in China, I grew up separated from migrating parents who left in search of work, constrained by economic necessity and structural policies that made family unity impossible.

This thesis investigates the psychological, social, and cultural realities of left-behind children, with particular attention to left-behind girls, whose emotional labor and silence are often normalized.

Through sculpture, installation, and archival practice, I translate lived experience and research into material form. Art, in this project, functions simultaneously as: visual testimony, quantitative research, a healing practice, and an act of recognition.