"Stone: The Sacred Relic" from the ongoing series "We Can(Not) See the Void".
The "Three Sages of the Western Pure Land" at Shengguo Temple have undergone a radical displacement across a millennium of natural erosion and political destruction: regressing from specific religious iconography into abstract geological matter. Caught in an "archaeological impasse" defined by an acute scarcity of visual records, the countenances of the Three Sages have become a permanent void.
My work does not seek to recover a lost truth. Instead, it constructs a contemporary phantasm upon the ruins of absence. Through a process of image grafting, I superimpose the aura of contemporaneous local statues onto the damaged statues, while replacing the vanished Buddhist halos with the analytical language of archaeological papers. This intervention transforms the image into a site of negotiation—where sacred aura, rational text, and eroded matter press against one another.
I direct my lens deep into the stones, crystals, and fissures, entering into dialogue with the statues through a "haptic gaze." This is more than a confrontation with historical displacement; it is an experiment in the ontology of the image. Through the intervention of digital tools, I seek to trace the movement of narrative displacement and, within the shifting coordinates of our world, reshape a perceptual orientation for these silent stones.
