As a result of the invitation to participate in the 2008 Guangzhou triennial, Campos-Pons began investigating her Chinese ancestry and including it in her art. She created the installation “My Mother Told Me I Am Chinese: China Porcelain” (2008) for the triennial, including forty porcelain vessels and an acrylic shelf overlaying a video; Campos-Pons appears in front of a mirror performing a sort of ritual to the rhythm of music composed by Neil Leonard, while wearing a Yoruba mask which she later removes to paint her face white and cover her head with a veil, like a porcelain doll, suggesting a resemblance between the figures yet revealing a multifaceted and different appearance. The vessels evoke the relationship between Chinese porcelain used in Santería rituals (an Afro-Cuban religion combining Yoruba and Catholic elements), echoing the syncretism and presence of those cultures in herself and in Cuba. For the second and next iterations of the installation, the artist made and hand-painted each vase during her residency at the Harvard Ceramics Program in 2008, depicting landscapes of Cuba, Chinese characters and symbols, as well as Yoruba deities like Ochún, Ogún, Changó, and Yemayá, among others.
In addition, Campos-Pons created a self-portrait that often accompanies the installation, titled “My Mother Told Me I Am Chinese: The Painting Lesson” (2008). In her characteristic grid-like composition, the portrait features nine or, in some cases, twenty-one, large-scale polaroids that capture her dressed as in the video from “China Porcelain” with her face painted in white. What began as the construction of an exploratory character in the past, later came to be her artistic “persona”: FeFa (standing for Familiares en el Extranjero/Family Abroad). FeFa appeared both in photos and in person in performances around the globe, as in the 11th Havana Biennial in 2012 and the 55th Venice Biennial in 2013, among many others until the present day. In 2024, she produced a new watercolor piece recreating her figure from the polaroids, to be presented at Galerie Barbara Thumm for the first time.
