note to softly burning orbits

In Softly Burning Orbits, trees and the potential they hold as generators, facilitators, and progenerators of life, are abstracted from their “nature” and grafted (as trees are) into a broader narrative schema, unraveled through scholarship, sculpture, and painting. As the tree takes on the role of an interlocutor, guiding and probing our curiosity through its varied forms, the gentle, liminal space constructed in SBO probes us further into the frightening unknown alongside the supposedly, or purportedly known.

How ought we to bury, remember, and those who have died? Is a funeral ritual more about a celebration of life, or a reconciliation with death? These questions are at once native and foreign: deeply human wonderings that are shrouded in mystery and taboo.

Weaving together strands from a wide array of precedents, histories, and traditions, SBO seeks to recalibrate, or at the very least re-examine, our thinking on these difficult questions. The ever-iterated objects on display, through the facture of their form, the gesture of their color, and the fiber of their material, question the efficacy of the binaries endemic to ideas of death and dying. Equally speculative and experimental, SBO seeks to break down the certainty and comfortability with which we think about and use these binary systems - sentience vs. non sentience, organic vs. inorganic, growth vs. decay. As such, the “work” of this work operates in a third space of in between: a position in which past, present, and future - living, non-living and dead – can be held together, suspended, at once. Working across time, media and material, the exhibited form of SBO resembles a palimpsest: Like a manuscript that is constantly being built upon, erased, edited, and written over, it is a work propelled by rework, iteration, and synthesis. SBO faithfully and delicately confronts ancient burial traditions, rooted in the writings, while absorbing, synthesizing, and transmitting those traditions and themes to generate new meaning in the future.

As a project, SBO consists of three distinct products: a book, a sculptural installation, and a series of paintings. Whereas the book provides a critical theoretical underpinning for the project (which indeed guides and informs the rest of the project) it is the didactic and unemotional beginning; an information-dense and polemical work. The sculptures represent a faithful interpretation, imagination, and stretching forward of the book’s work, animating its framework off the paperly surface to take on new resonance as sculptural (yet not structural) forms. In its final, most evocative register, Yu’s paintings are abstracted from, yet indebted to, their preceding products: it is here, in the entanglement of paint and wood that the final “act” of SBO plays out: one which is emphatically emotional, evocative, and gestural: they represent the book’s potentialities in a visualized form.

Tristan Whalen

softly burning orbits: scripture
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