Across life beyond death, a testimony of impermanence started on a journey to Tibet …
On 11 February 2006 in Kansu in the midst of the Losar Blessing Ritual (“Losar” is the Tibetan word for New Year). I was on my way for the “Sutra Rotation.”
On the top of the mountain, there were clothes, shoes and accessories scattered everywhere on the slopes — it was a tradition of the inhabitants to condole the passing of their relatives.
Not far away, I saw a father who was crying and shaking his daughter’s body fiercely.
I was shocked not because of the heart-broken crying of the father, but by how the little girl’s body behaved: soft, dolllike, lifeless and impotent — her tragic body without soul and breath was so “thing-like” at that moment, it seemed like a shell and cruelly, a lump of material. |
 | Our bodily participation in existence is so impermanent and temporary, dust-like … dream-like … when compared to the vastness of the Universe.
Let’s see — atoms in the ocean mutate, morph and flee their “oceanic state” to form a temporal solidity; sculptures emerged into an aggregation from an escaped ocean. The flow of sand and water and the flux of the existence in different materials …
The sculptures do exist yet illusory, we shall witness the illusive nature of their corporeality driven by their desire of becoming, followed by their gradual and unavoidable disintegration back into nothingness. |
Atom Ocean: once we are dead, we don’t have to worry about dying anymore
Mixed-media installation Sand, ice, glass table supported by steel structure, glass tubes, Dimensions variable Sha Tin Town Hall and Stanley Plaza, Hong Kong, 2006 All
Content © 2007 Amy Cheung |
