The Moon's Shadow
Single-channel video, color, stereo sound, Drawing exercises, Watercolor paper, Grey cardboard
2026
The living beings collected, identified, and understood within the village were not regarded as isolated individuals, but rather as part of an entire worldview woven together by environment, customs, collective values, personality, and memory. Within such a system, the environment, humans, and other living beings were inseparable from one another. They shared the same rhythms and frequencies, preserved and transmitted through stories, rituals, and customs accumulated across generations. This knowledge was not sustained by any single individual; it required the collective participation and shared effort of the community, continually reaffirmed and enacted through oral storytelling and embodied practices. In this context, storytelling was not merely a way of transmitting information, but an act of shaping the world itself. Stories influenced how humans understood themselves and others, while also defining their place within society and the environment.
Across many regions of Asia and India, one can observe a widespread yet regionally varied narrative lineage: ancient myths surrounding rice. Although these stories take different forms across cultures, they share a similar structure: the spirit of rice often appears in the form of a woman, frequently depicted as a maternal figure who, through self-sacrifice, allows the earth to regenerate and humanity to endure. The goddess’s body transforms into crops, symbolizing the cyclical process of fertility, death, and harvest. In cultures where rice cultivation forms the foundation of life, rice beliefs developed a close and dynamic relationship with monsoon climates, agricultural festivals, and ecological change. From this perspective, perhaps we can begin to ask again: how do we look at ourselves, and how do we position ourselves within culture? Is culture merely tied to a fixed geographical location, or is it instead a fluid system of continuous exchange and mutual influence?
This project is based on field research conducted in the village of Panggungharjo, Indonesia. Through conversations with the village chief, women’s farming collectives, and local farmers, the project documents stories, beliefs, and the traditional rice mortar music Gejog Lesung associated with the rice goddess Dewi Sri. The research focuses on “local perception,” examining how plants are preserved within cultural knowledge systems through memory, naming, use, and oral storytelling. Presented as a single-channel video and shadow puppet animation, the work combines eclipse mythology, goddess narratives, and Gejog Lesung to explore interconnected rice myths and narratives of female sacrifice across East and Southeast Asia. Through abstract silhouettes of human figures and objects, layered rhythms, and collective sound, the work attempts to reweave the relationships between people, nature, and cultural memory.
They dance in the dark
Aluminum plate, wooden support structure, ceramic panel, ceramic work
2025
They Dance in the Dark is a newly commissioned work presented as a museological display centered on Mandragora (mandrake), the plant is a mysterious plant that has appeared in botanical compendiums since ancient times. As early as the 1st century, it was depicted as a hybrid creature with human-like features, reflecting the entangled relationship between plant anthropomorphism and female imagery. In the history of medicinal plants in the West, it has carried associations with hallucination and transformation, implicating ancient goddesses, witches, and maternal myths. Throughout the transmission of
eshold between hallucination and healing, death and rebirth. The mandrake often appears alongside female figures: from Hathor, the Egyptian goddess who embodies both fertility and destruction, to Circe, the Greek sorceress who used herbs to perform transformative magic, to the medieval witches accused of using mandrakes to make ointments for hallucinatory rituals or even for infanticide. These images and narratives together shaped the figure of the “witch” as a bearer of repressed knowledge and lunar energy. Women were long excluded from the male-centered writing of medicine and pharmacology, cast as the “Other” within systems of knowledge. The image of the witch became a convenient pretext for the witch hunts of the Middle Ages. But were these women merely imagined figures? Or were t
hey knowledge practitioners who learned from plants and enacted their wisdom through embodied rituals—whose contours became blurred by oral transmission and the absence of historical record? The anthropomorphic image of the mandrake functions as a mirror of these submerged narratives, reflecting those unspeakable feminine forces and collective memories. In these rituals and myths, the relationship between humans and plants is not one of dominance and subordination, but one of co-dancing, forming a mode of existence as a “hybrid subject.” The mandrake is not merely an herb, nor simply a species under botanical taxonomy, but a spiritual being that carries history, energy, hallucination, and mystical perception.
Ladies
2023
The Loves of the Plants written by naturalist and poet, Erasmus Darwin, in the 18 th century is a set of nature observation poetry based on a proposal made by Carl Linnaeus at the time, which classified plants based on their sexual characteristics. In the early stage of this plant taxonomy system, it was quite controversial to compare plant organs to human sex organs. However, this anthropomorphic way of imagining plants has become the foundation of today’s plant taxonomy. Through intricate biology observations, The Loves of the Plants presented the characteristics, senses, and desires of plants using anthropomorphic expressions, and female subjectivity was emphasized. The artwork, Ladies, presents a script adapted from three poems/three plants(Mimosa, Arum, and Cuscuta) written by Darwin and explores how humans perceived nature when this particular knowledge system was initially established. The content of this exploration is not intended as response to the age-old question of anthropocentrism; rather, emphasis is placed on tracing the driving force behind humans’ initial perception of the world. In the process of “seeing/perceiving/understanding”, human beings also carry out some kind of inner perceptual production, with imagination thereby evoked. The artists have pondered on the converging point of this driving force and the production of art, and they seek to use the three themes of senses, shapes, and narratives to construct Darwin’s imagination of plants. “Anthropomorphism” is based on an awareness that exploit all things, but it is also a biological instinct that empathizes with all things.
If Narratives Become the Great Flood
2020
The Great Flood is regarded as a common myth in numerous cultures in the world. There are records of floods found in 254 ethnic groups and 84 languages. Regarding the eternal statement of human death and rebirth, the Great Flood is always believed as the most representative myth among all these catastrophes. As rivers converge into the sea, these detailed and continuous narratives of myth have been accumulated by day and night over years. Despite the dissemination through oral and written languages that vary and transform throughout generations, they all carry a similar and complete structure of narrative This project tries to explore and capture certain common characteristics of narration among “myth”, “consciousness” and “contemporary image” , merging into a dreamlike script with fluidity of consciousness, through a fragmental, repetitive, and deconstructing structure of narratives. The
contemporary images are applied as the metaphor of various forms and symbols of ancient myths, in an attempt to reconstruct the way how we perceive the world in the modern era. In this sense, “If Narratives Become the Great Flood” does not intend to explore further about the authenticity and meaning of the myth of flood. The genre of narrative of “The Great Flood” is considered as the tree-like species classification of taxonomy in the modern era. The dissemination of how the myth creates all of the creation in the world is as how the flow of river from the mainstream into different branches of regions.
