香//Low Tide Joss Paper
2022
Handmade paper, overbeaten abaca, dried anchovies, salt, incense powder, gold and silver pigment
In my process, the repeated act of creation in multiples becomes a ritual act of remembrance. Joss is offered with prayers to the ancestors, a practice that in my own family was erased through colonization.
Transmuted through the paper's smoke, messages from the living world are sent to the ancestors. When burned, these papers emit this smell and memory of the places that no longer exist but long to be remembered, and return to the cycles from which their materials came from. Invoking flame through this process also recalls the racially motivated destruction of many early Californian Chinese settlements by arson and subsequent dispersal of their residents.
This project is an act of re-envisioning the power of this ritual, reclaiming not just the destructive nature of fire, but the regeneration and healing it brings as well. Invoking ancestral craft and practice as a thru line to personal history, this project explores the destruction-creation cycle of fire, its cultural heritage, the context of fire in California’s environment, and the imperfection and amnesia of cultural memory as well as my own fragmented personal histories.
