COMMODE




Notes from Manifesto in the Bamboo Forest
Jieying Cai, 2026


Read more about Manifesto in the Bamboo Forest here.


“When we work with ancient material, your hands start to become familiar with the old ways, your mind can follow and begin to reclaim our knowing and seeing.”[1] Nikau Hindin was describing her reasoning for using natural pigments despite the inconvenience and challenges of that process. That kōrero has continued to stick with me as I work with bamboo.

‘Manifesto In The Bamboo Forest’ was an offsite wānanga supported by COMMODE in April 2026 where a group of artists came together in Hokianga to learn bamboo harvesting. In the beginning, we carved chopsticks out of bamboo. The process of taking away a material and revealing what is beneath taught me how bamboo grows and why Chinese scripture was written and read top to bottom rather than left and right. This is reflected in bamboo slips zhujian 竹简 – one of the earliest writing material in China.[2]

Chinese readers who learnt simplified Chinese in schooling (me) and the alienation of arriving in Taiwan and Hong Kong seeing characters familiar and unfamiliar is really alienating. This is a result of forcing a language on people for a national identity. Mother tongue in this instant is built off of imperialism, nationalism and colonialism.[3] Grappling with understanding traditional Chinese is like Hindin using natural pigments instead of replacing them with pigments you can purchase. It is an instant gratification for diaspora to be able to read simplified Chinese but it's not the Chinese my great grandmother read (if she even was allowed to read).

I am working towards writing more in traditional Chinese. There is a new word I learnt recently: huandalu 环大陆 and it means a show/play that is made in mainland China but only aired outside like a satellite because of its homosexual content. Hong Kong and Taiwan continuing to use traditional Chinese is a learning motivation to understand texts that would otherwise be censored in mainland China.

Three highlights from the wānanga:

1. Zed and I's guzheng monologue performance after a group dinner. I've seen Zed perform with the guzheng instrument at Elam and at Studio One. In those rooms it was clear who was the spectator and who was the performer. The hollow wooden string instrument feels exotic and foreign. During the wānanga, when we performed in the sun room people stayed and played with the instrument after the performance instead. No matter how it was played, it sounded beautiful.

2. Making walnut and rosemary bread with Trish before the wānanga started because I thought buying one loaf would last 8 people for three days.

3. Harvesting the bamboo with the group of artists in the same place I first learnt how to harvest bamboo.

I've worked with people with disabilities. I've got good friends in their 70's and 80's. I've been reading semi autobiographical novels by lesbian Chinese authors (Chen Ran) and the common thread between all of them is when you are restrained by your body, or when you have to hide your sexuality – limitation oozes creativity when there is no time to take bullshit.

This is what working with DJCS at COMMODE is like. Those reading that know about DJCS' disability over the last 10 years will know what I'm talking about. He doesn’t have time for bullshit because you never know if he is sedated or about to get surgery in the hospital. Shifting from disability as an obstacle to a way of methodology when working with COMMODE has made me cherish what we value in the process of making when the superiority of deadlines is stripped back to a mere side dish.

DJCS challenged me to move away from making work for photographic documentation for archives but how can an installation suggest the creative potential of the material. During the transportation of bamboo from the far north to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, it has been made clear that long hollow grass is much easier to carry with two people. Teamwork and community building that is inevitable at every step of the process. Switching from exhibition output to focus on wānanga has let me lean into the curatorial care of building and skill sharing in a room of people.

The most common question I get from people when they see a car load of bamboo is “what are you going to do with all this bamboo? How are you going to display it?” If I had to give them the long answer it would be: who knows? Though when the bamboo is transported from one place to another and it needs to be held by more than one pair of hands I sense the collective community we are building with this natural material despite its foreignness to this land. I grew up sleeping on this material as a child, its called woven bamboo mat liangxi 凉席 and in my grandmother's house she hung her laundry dry from bamboo this thick.


  1. The Artpaper soil 2022-23 Threads of continuity: Māori Aute Nikau Hindin interviewed by Rongoai Grbic-Hoskins. I’ve taken inspiration from this interview and reworded to my learnings working with bamboo grass.

  2. Tsinghua university Ancient Chinese documents challenge understanding of early Confucianism https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1418/14256.htm

  3. Direct quote from Qianye and Qianhe Lin ‘a story is not a promise / a choral monologue,’ Pearl The Bells exhibition catalogue, page 4.

Jieying Cai 蔡杰盈 is a first-generation Chinese New Zealander with ancestors from Ganzhou 贛州. She is a multimedia artist and curator, currently exploring themes of belonging and identity in natural fibre and installation.