2012
Medium：paper, natural reed, shadow
Dimension：dimensions variable
A quiet choreography of reed and paper unfolds across the wall, capturing the instant a breath of wind disturbs still water. Each reed is gathered from the riverbank, bent back into the memory of its own flowing, then laced with hand-cut paper skins. The spiraling discs hover like lily-pads, yet their shadows pool beneath them, so two ponds—one tangible, one spectral—exist in the same fragile space.
In Chinese thought, the lotus is hailed as a 君子 (junzi, “gentleman”) because it “出淤泥而不染” — it rises unsullied from the mud. That ideal of purity within complexity threads through this work. Reeds, literal pond plants, partner with paper, a refined human fiber, mapping a terrain that is neither wholly natural nor wholly cultural—much like my own life between languages, homelands, and ways of knowing.
The installation’s delicacy invites touch yet risks collapse, echoing the brittle ecologies of the wetlands I recall from childhood and the precarious balance of the body I inhabit today. Shadows double every form, suggesting that what we perceive is always accompanied by what we remember—or overlook.
In the Pond asks the viewer to slow down, to notice how a line of light becomes a ripple, how a shadow becomes a memory. It is a meditation on transience and integrity: the way water forgets a disturbance almost as soon as it forms, and the way a lotus, despite its origins in mire, opens each day in perfect, untarnished bloom.