without beginning (2026)
2026 · single-channel video, silent · 2048 × 2048, 30 fps · 48 seconds, looped
Seven silent square loops, each forty-eight seconds, joined so that no beginning can be found. Buddhist practice is overwhelmingly repetitive: counting a mala, chanting, circumambulating a pagoda, lighting incense every morning. Practice of that kind has no natural end, and neither do these. There is no arc and nothing to wait for. A viewer standing for thirty seconds and one standing for twenty minutes receive the same thing.
Vessel
A gourd and a human skull occupy the same position and are made of the same pixels, crossfading through the vocabulary of a failing broadcast signal. Neither reading settles. The image arrives at the skull, passes through it, and is a gourd again, so the recognition is not an event that happens once but a condition the image is permanently inside.
Water
The moon sits fixed on the surface while gusts cross the water, coarsening the image as they pass and letting it resolve behind them. Nothing causes the disturbance and nothing ends it. The moon is never destroyed and never quite arrives, and the water goes on doing this whether or not anyone is watching.
Seal
The whole of Uisang's diagram, printed in four colors with the bleed and dot structure of halftone, traveling inward through itself without arriving. The line is never drawn, because it was never not there. There is no scale at which the whole thing resolves, and no point at which it begins.
Lantern
A neon lotus somewhere in the long middle of its life. Segments have failed, one tube never quite catches, and the current dips and recovers on its own. Nothing is repaired and nothing is switched off. The sign is simply still on, and getting worse at a rate too slow to notice.
Shadow
A gilt-bronze Pensive Bodhisattva, lit by a single flame that never settles. One ankle rests across the opposite knee and the fingertips touch the cheek. The shadow he throws stretches and leans as the light moves. Nothing else changes: the only movement in forty-eight seconds is light falling on a figure who has been thinking for fourteen hundred years.
Incense
A Goryeo celadon incense burner, still burning. Three filaments of smoke leave the lid in straight lines, begin to wander as they rise, and disperse before they reach the top of the frame. The color of the smoke is taken from the glaze, so the censer and the air above it are the same green.
Beads
A prayer cord of 108 beads, one for each of the defilements of mind counted in Buddhist psychology. Four larger markers divide it into quarters. The cord does not move; the beads travel along it, the way they do in a hand, drawn on one at a time and then held. No hand appears. When the cord comes round, the counting begins again with the same beads.