Week Forty-Five | Silk Road

Reflection on the Unit Two feedback has taken me back to the Ancestral origins I was exploring before this MA. The difference was that I didn’t really know what I was doing then, I was just flailing around going with instinct. I feel like now the result is the same, or similar, but I have a better sense of why I am interested in this stuff.

Whilst picking up work from the Pastel Society show in London I visited the British Museum to see the Silk Road exhibition, which was fantastic. So much of the stuff I have always loved but also so resonant with my thinking in my work currently. Scroll painting, journeys into the past and all the colonial histories but more significantly, wider entanglements are coming up for me once more.

The Admonition Scroll caught my attention again, I remember seeing them when at Camberwell, long old time ago. I feel like this will help pave the way for some new work that is just on the edge of finding itself. I enjoyed the Living and Dying Exhibit too.

Admonition Scroll

I bought the book in the British Museum shop and I’ve loved pouring over the details. I love the elegance and faded simplicity, an aesthetic I feel so much love for and familiarity with. I feel like this has opened up a possibility for me that makes a lot of sense: the idea of a long scroll has captured my interest since long before the MA (my preoccupations with the Bayeux Tapestry, for example), a long trace narrative and my exploration of ancestral worship, contextualising my grief in a wider history of Hong Kong and my own personal ancestry and loss. I have a pile of unfinished panels I have been working on that could work so well in this vein and I can hardly wait to get started with them. The Mountain and the Archer, perhaps.