Medium: Assorted animal materials (coral, jellyfish, crab, barnacle, bone), silver, bodhi tree seed beads, and photo on cotton string, projection and archaeological matter on linen.
Dimensions: Variable
Price: Upon request
Description: Every Lunar New Year, spring couplets adorn doorways: Auspicious poems to welcome wealth and good fortune into the household. Who is writing spring couplets for the dead to step through the gates of their time? If the new year marks the completion of a cycle for the living, who celebrates the survival of the passed into a new and dawning age? What is spring like in the deep ocean? What is dawn like without the sun? spring couplet in eve's tongue wonders after a language that could enunciate a spring festival poem for those of another time and state than the living. Legend tells how Cang Jie developed written characters by observing closely the imprints of things--the traces left behind by a tiger and the patterns etched into the bark of a tree. What poetry is to be found in a body and what word is pronounced by the shell, the husk, the skeleton--the things that held the body but are left behind when it moves on? What survives this passage? And what survives into the passage? Weaving together sundried velella velella (by-the-wind sailor), coral, crab shells, historical materials documenting Chinese sailors and fishing-folk in Monterey, the flotsam of logistics capitalism, the archaeological remnants of china shards from 1900's Monterey fishing villages, and her great-grandfather's medicine scale, the artist presents a couplet that does not name nor speak nor invoke but follows, hangs, casts. Part speculative celebration ritual for the Lunar New Year and part meditation on the queer poetry and odd rhymes created by things that sail by wind to places they do not belong, the couplet stays with the ocean as a ruin from whose wreckage the gilded speech of a shining world surfaces.
spring couplet in eve's tongue, twice sunken | 120710 -
