Champollion fainted, she says, once he had wrested their secret from the hieroglyphs and saw them turn transparent. The serpent no longer with power to strike, but biting its tail. I smell my salts, my packets of words, panicked. I’m no longer sure whether they shape my reality or have too little mass to interact with naked matter. Then they would pass right through the earth as I will in death.
– From Rosmarie Waldrop, “Conversation 12: On Hieroglyphs” from Reluctant Gravities
Through objects and installations, Michelle Chang Qin (Chongqing, 1996) depicts labor, its process and products, as offerings to a great absence: amputated speech, forgotten rituals, partial histories that escape a collective memory but leave ineffable weights.
Drawing on the material and gestural vocabularies of an assembly line, she proposes sculptural instruments of pauses and repetitions. Threads can be woven densely or sparsely to create fabrics of caring, ornament, filtration, or trapping and disguise. Sourced from makeshift spaces of temporary facilities and interim structures commonly used in sites of production, her work imagines
Photos by Chun-Han Chiang
