Before leaving for China, I read the book Wild Swans by Jung Chang. This story chronicles her experience of living through the Cultural Revolution. At one point, Chang recalls being “told to go out and start removing all the grass from the lawns.” According to Mao, grass, flowers, and even pets were incompatible with revolutionary ideals.

Yard Work is a performance that speaks to the disconnect between the above passage and the relative tranquility of my own experience. Whereas Chang was instructed to remove grass, I spent a month growing it. I then laid it in my yard. Yard Work acknowledges the discrepancy between Chang's experience and my own; it reveals how the act of tending to grass can carry radically different meanings depending on history, ideology, and place.