“I want to mix my ashes with yours” is a line from an ancient Chinese poem written by a bride who has just been married.[1] Imagining a distant future in which her bones and flesh burn into ashes and mingle with those of her groom, the bride vows eternal love. Would such a vow still hold meaning within a pile of mingled ashes? In this exhibition, however, the phrase “mixing ashes” is not about unchanging love.

Instead, it invites us to imagine a scene in which all kinds of bodies surrounding us—buildings standing in this city, airplanes, machines, animals, insects—are reduced to ashes and scattered into the air. Could they mix their ashes with others even before death? Is it possible to answer this question without relying on hypothetical conditions?

Human language, animal language, and machine language deliberately mimic one another within the exhibition space, sometimes casting mockery, sometimes aspiring to fracture the world itself. Even without being burned, they already share ashes. The first video of the three-channel installation welcomes viewers with a story of a world in which humans are born as casually as fruit growing on trees. The seemingly indifferent conversations among the characters suggest non-linear kinship relations without a clear center or periphery. Raised not by parents but by guardians who could be replaced at any time, these beings do not share a single navel.

In the two videos paired with this one, two dancers perform with stick insects. The movements of the stick insects resemble living branches, newborn offspring, or clumsy machines. Stick insects camouflage themselves as branches to hide their bodies; females are capable of reproducing asexually without males, and at times even reproduce after being eaten by birds, through the birds’ excrement.

The insects’ tentative, probing movements naturally leap across the boundaries of worlds: distinctions between species, food chains and survival, reproduction and proliferation, gender, and the extension and rupture of individual bodies. The two dancers and the two stick insects delicately yet roughly press their bodies together, testing weight and balance as if engaged in a tug-of-war.

On the floor of the exhibition space in front of the videos lies a large image that is not immediately legible. This image is the result of a subtle collaboration between artificial intelligence and the artist’s consciousness. Within an abstract field of ambiguous, unidentifiable colors, more discernible forms begin to emerge—shapes that resemble insect segments, mammalian fur, facial orifices, or cellular membranes, yet remain unnameable.

The only clearly representational image is that of a finger marked with numbers, which serves as a crucial clue to the collaborative process. Created using a text-based image generation algorithm, this collage both reveals and corrodes the irony embedded in the AI’s operational logic—its inevitable reproduction of the surface “attributes” contained within words.

Finally, at the entrance of the exhibition space, a bathtub holds something that evokes an uncanny skin, as though the boundaries of a bodily mass have completely collapsed. Beneath the bathtub, powdery residue is scattered, resembling the uncleaned remnants after a party—something like noise from a virtual world, or ashes.

Opening one’s ears beyond the boundaries of familiar agents of action may be the first step toward mixing our ashes. Fittingly, beside the entrance hangs an ellipse containing the phrase “…From and of all the languages that were spoken and written…,” whose beginning and end are impossible to determine.


Preface: Eunju Hong, Isu Kim

References

• 《I want to mix my ashes with yours》