At the center of the installation stands Lifeline, an aluminum figure enclosed within a stone-like shell a Gongshi (供石), also known as a scholar’s rock in Chinese culture. These naturally weathered stones, prized for their asymmetry, texture, and evocative presence, have historically been appreciated as microcosms of the universe, inviting contemplation and spiritual resonance. The aluminum figure forms the core of the work but is not intended to remain exposed.
Rather than a traditional stone, the Gongshi is constructed from fragments of skin-like parchment: Klaf (קלף), a material significant in Jewish tradition. Klaf refers to specially prepared parchment made from animal hide, traditionally used for sacred texts such as Torah scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot. Its status as both a surface of inscription and a container of meaning resonates with the duality of concealment and revelation at the core of the work.
Enclosed within the parchment Gongshi, the aluminum figure is almost entirely hidden. The skin-stone is pierced by thousands of pin-sized perforations, which become the sole points of visual access to the interior. The viewer is compelled to approach, peer through the openings, and reconstruct the concealed form by assembling fragmented glimpses. The sculpture can never be seen in its totality from any single vantage point; instead, perception must be synthesized in the viewer’s mind through embodied movement and iterative looking.
During the day, this act of visual reconstruction challenges habitual perception. At night, the sculpture within becomes invisible, except for the luminous glow of its lacquer patina seen through the holes. The perforations transform the body from mass into a radiant constellation of small, glowing, three-dimensional points, as though the figure were dissolving into or materializing from, the surrounding darkness. The viewing body is thus returned to its initial cosmic undifferentiation.
In addition to the countless pinholes, nine larger orifices correspond to the nine traditional openings of the human body. Lifeline draws symbolic inspiration from the funerary jade burial traditions of the Han dynasty, in particular the Jade Shroud of Chu, in which the body was preserved by sealing its openingsincluding the mouth, ears, eyes, and nose with jade elements, among them cicada-shaped plugs. The cicada, symbolizing rebirth and immortality, seals these openings, evoking an ancient practice intended to retain the soul within the body or guide it toward transcendence. Lifeline thus becomes a sculptural meditation on the body as a vessel, simultaneously finite and infinite.
The installation is accompanied by a thermal video projection and an enveloping, continuous soundscape, the hiss of cicadas. Thermal imaging reveals an ordinarily invisible register of heat and energetic circulation. The video metaphorically represents the life flow running through a bamboo stem, each node marking a distinct stage of existence. Together, image and sound extend the sculpture’s exploration of transformation, passage, mortality, and renewal.
This piece is, at its core, about enclosures and permeabilities: the envelopment of body within stone, text within skin, and human existence within larger cycles of transformation. It draws from the rituals and symbolisms of both Chinese and Jewish traditions, weaving them into a contemporary meditation on mortality, memory, material transformation, and the shifting boundaries between the finite and the infinite.
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Lifeline is a series of drawings executed on קלף (klaf, Hebrew: parchment), the material traditionally prepared by סופר סת"ם (sofer stam, scribe of sacred texts) for the inscription of Torah scrolls and other ritual writings. This substrate, imbued with corporeal and spiritual resonance, becomes a site for meditating on vitality, materiality, and projection. The works depict 供石 (gōngshí, Chinese: scholar’s rocks), long prized as aesthetic objects and, crucially, as cognitive instruments. Like Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots, gōngshí operate as ambiguous, generative forms onto which the scholar projects thought, serving as catalysts for imaginative exploration.
In Lifeline, this meditative stone is not merely represented but anatomized: its silhouette is traversed by intricately drawn capillary networks. These vascular motifs extend across the parchment itself, reinscribing the klaf’s own material origin as once-living skin. This visual suturing of stone and body forges a symbolic continuum between mineral stasis and biological flow, positing the scholar’s stone as a surrogate body a resonant matrix in which lifeblood and thought are entwined. The capillary tracings thus evoke not only the gōngshí’s imaginative function but also the latent vitality of the parchment’s own materiality.
By conjoining the Judaic tradition of sacred inscription with the Sino-Daoist tradition of contemplative objects infused with qi (vital energy), Lifeline articulates a transcultural poetics of circulation. The series proposes that ink, blood, and qi are facets of a unified life-flow, a continuous circuit in which matter and spirit are co-constitutive. The work resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the intertwining of flesh and world, and with new materialist theories of vital matter, suggesting that the imaginative act itself is corporeally grounded. Through the meticulous drawing of lifelines capillaries that traverse both stone and parchment, the series reanimates inert matter, enacting a dynamic systole and diastole of perception
