This practice-based research project explores Chinese women’s perceptions and reflections on family and death through the country’s culture of ancestral worship. Drawing on my own experience of life and the ceremonies around death in China, I will address women’s often-emotive sense of oppression and exclusion from mourning rituals in this patriarchal society. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of mourning as ongoing transformation and Pamela Anderson’s concept of “identities-in-process,” the project unfolds in three interwoven strands: 1) speaking with Chinese women about the funeral, grief and notions of inheritance, 2) making small-scale, hand-sized sculptures that echo the forms of Chinese offerings-to-the-dead, and 3) making small-scale watercolour studies that imagine descriptions and images of the Shandong funeral ceremony, that meditate upon its actors, its staging, and performance. This project, while drawn from my cultural heritage, engages with cross-cultural sources too in its turn to the figure of Eurydice from the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s cycle of 55 ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ of 1922, which were written after the untimely death of his daughter’s friend, Wera Ouckama Knoop. In contrast to poets engaging with this myth who had come before him, Rilke focused upon the figure of Eurydice, channelling Wera through his imagining of this mythical young woman, putting female experience at the centre stage. While rooted in Confucian funeral traditions and post-Opium War Christian encounters, my thesis puts into correspondence my own experience as a young woman of the Chinese culture of commemorating and remembering the dead, with Rilke’s poetic imagining of Eurydice, as well with contemporary artists Citra Sasmita, Dorothy Cross, and Esther Teichmann, whose practices model how folklore, site specificity, and myth can be repurposed for feminist critique.