JADE BABY BAMBOO SPINE is a sacrificial ritual, a lived and enacted rite—a real-time invocation. A hunted body gives itself over, only to split across timelines, slipping between prey and predator, vessel and force. The work traverses multiple geohistories, weaving together death practices from Korea, Taiwan, Tibet, Cornwall, and England. These lineages do not rest—they rub against one another, transforming the concept of fate into something raw, frictive, and alive.
Through cycles of pursuit, restraint, and release, the body undergoes an alchemical undoing: hunted, transfigured, devoured, and dispersed. The ritual unspools across the sea cliffs, forest, and stone circles—liminal spaces where ecological kinship and power relations are destabilised. Within the sea cave, a monstrous emergence takes shape. A spine is consumed. A threshold is crossed. What is surrendered does not vanish; it is metabolised, returned, and multiplied—as a force that exceeds itself, spilling beyond the limits of form.
The work was created in ritual collaboration with Jade O’Belle, Aditya Surya Taruna a.k.a. Kasimyn, and Georgie Rei-n Lo.
“From black and white into colour, dream state into consciousness, we see a forest spirit, a kind of Djinn, imbibed elixirs, and a stone circle; binaries of ecstasy and death, master and slave, and liminal phases fill the frame. ... Absurdly intoxicating.”
— Mike Pinnington, The Double Negative
Commissioned by Bluecoat Liverpool with funding from John EllermanFoundation, Foyle Foundation, Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council. For the exhibition breathe, spirit and life 呼吸、靈魂與生命 curated by Katherine Ka Yi Liu 廖加怡.