Fragile
Cang Art Museum, Hangzhou

End, And..., 2022
Digital print on Fantac 105gsm rice paper
burning installation; video installation

One of the Chinese funeral customs is to burn paper offerings for the dead, including golden bar, winter clothes, luxury cars, and houses these common goods showing wealth and privilege. These figurative forms represent the living's collective understanding of happiness. What caught my attention are those unusual ones such as credit cards, disinfectants, and sunscreen, which break logic behind these products of the religion's pursuit of the "bliss" world, cause these unusual also mean debt, disease, which shouldn’t be involved in happiness, so I tried to trace back to the source to find a rationale for their existence.

In the Buddhist context, there is a forty-nine-day "Bargo" period between life and death, when passed can sense from both. The root of suffering lies not in simply birth or death but rather the continuous cycle of reincaxrnation. These recreations of reality are not meant to transform the underworld into a beautiful new world but to break the deceased's obsession to offer a opportunity to get away form the cycle. Paper offerings offer the living an opportunity to express their thoughts and also give the deceased a chance to fulfill their wishes.The "eye, ear, nose, taste, touch, conscious" are the Buddhist generalization of how people perceive the world, so I create these six imaged and burnt them at the exhibition, transforming the whole world all together.