Exhibition Statement

Buddhist teachings describe human perception as six roots(六根)—sight, hearing, touch, taste, thought, and feeling—each a source of both fleeting joy and suffering. Our senses, entangled in impermanence, make us witnesses to continuous loss. To grieve is to claim our existence in this slippery space of mourning, yet also to recognize its transformative power in an artful way.  

This exhibition is rooted in the affective terrain of bodies tendering with grief. Through photography, text, handwriting, collage, moving image, installation, and participatory engagement, the show brings together the work of two long-term friends and collaborators, huiyin zhou and laura dudu. As queer feminist artists and organizers, we often turn to grief as a tender, embodied site of knowledge—a soil from which rebirth is possible. We quietly ponder, through frames of silences and breaths.  

How can we imagine the shape, color, and texture of our grief? Navigating the layered terrain of memory—personal, familial, and communal – the show both traces family histories and lingers alongside the (un)recorded knowledge of our ancestors. It sits with the fragile ways kinship is built and lost while living in diaspora. In documenting, we also implicate grief itself: to remember is to mourn, and to mourn is to affirm the weight of what once was.  

This exhibition invites the audience to reimagine grief as a site of possibilities. Like a palimpsest, grief is written over and rewritten, textured by time. We hope these works can nourish practices of holding grief gently, yet deeply—of making space for mourning while gesturing toward what might emerge from its depths. Here, our bodies are not only carriers of loss but also vessels of (re)birth.