In Gefei Qi, the artist reworks Wagner’s heroic figure into the image of a contemporary schoolboy. In the original myth, Siegfried is a young man cursed by his noble bloodline, unknowingly trapped within an ancient heroic narrative that ultimately leads to his destruction by idealism itself. By giving this name to a child placed beneath symbols of the rising red sun, the work draws a fragile connection between individual life and collective ideology.
The figure links personal growth to the repetition of history: 1911, 1939, 1966, and a projected 2028 suggest different generations facing similar structural pressures. The child’s body becomes a site where history and ideology quietly converge—he does not yet fully grasp their meaning, yet he is already shaped by them. The work leaves this condition unresolved, hovering between the possibility of losing oneself in freedom, being broken by ideals, or surviving within reality.