煦 (Susie Zhu) (2023, Printmaking and Literary Arts)
Funeral: shadows walk slowly into a thin slumber of sea, 2021
Mirrored acrylic, encaustic process with Japanese papers (kozo & gampi), velvet cloth, vellum, photo intaglio, photo-polymer
This book is a relic of the artist's ephemeral performance-installation (duration: 7 hours) with the same title, consisting of ice sculptures(with prints on their surfaces),poetry,sound,time. In the performance, ice melts with the image, lost but also released into the formless, into water, reborn, along with intermittent words of poetry that emerge from the ambient music.
Both the book and the performance are a contemplation of the idea of <lost and (re)emergence> in relation to Zen & Buddhist concepts of life & death, and how one could embody (rather than oppose) the other.
Believing this ephemeral performance defies a traditional way of documentation (that strives to replicate the process/or "to make a mummy" out of the documented work so as to prevent the deceased from taking place, such as filming the performance) the artist decided to make a "resting place" instead, for these "deceased performers," this book is not a reproduction of the poems/chants, the shadow prints nor the ices forms, but a "shadow" of all of them. A small, soft tomb, a relic they reside, a soft bed to sleep and dream its next life into.
Funeral: shadows walk slowly into a thin slumber of sea, 2021
Mirrored acrylic, encaustic process with Japanese papers (kozo & gampi), velvet cloth, vellum, photo intaglio, photo-polymer
This book is a relic of the artist's ephemeral performance-installation (duration: 7 hours) with the same title, consisting of ice sculptures(with prints on their surfaces),poetry,sound,time. In the performance, ice melts with the image, lost but also released into the formless, into water, reborn, along with intermittent words of poetry that emerge from the ambient music.
Both the book and the performance are a contemplation of the idea of <lost and (re)emergence> in relation to Zen & Buddhist concepts of life & death, and how one could embody (rather than oppose) the other.
Believing this ephemeral performance defies a traditional way of documentation (that strives to replicate the process/or "to make a mummy" out of the documented work so as to prevent the deceased from taking place, such as filming the performance) the artist decided to make a "resting place" instead, for these "deceased performers," this book is not a reproduction of the poems/chants, the shadow prints nor the ices forms, but a "shadow" of all of them. A small, soft tomb, a relic they reside, a soft bed to sleep and dream its next life into.
From The Witching Hour, Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, January 23 - February 26, 2023
