Across the book, skin, bark, veins, roots, folds, and branches begin to echo one another, until the boundary between body and nature slowly starts to dissolve.
Holding the Book
I wanted the book to feel like more than just a sequence of images. Through thread, translucent layers, rubbings, and collected fragments, it becomes something physical to hold and move through — less like a photo book, and more like a body carrying traces inside it.
Reading the Body
This project began with a feeling I have carried for a long time: that the body is not separate from nature, but belongs to the same world of signs, patterns, and forms. Through my interest in Xiao Liu Ren, a traditional Chinese divination system, I found a language for that feeling. What draws me to Xiao Liu Ren is not just divination itself, but the fact that it reads meaning through the body: the six palaces are traditionally assigned to positions across the joints of the fingers, so that the hand becomes a kind of living diagram. The body is not treated as neutral, but as something already marked, already structured, and already waiting to be read. That idea became central to this work. A vein can echo a root, skin can resemble bark, and a fold in the body can feel strangely close to a crack in stone.
Ana Mendieta has also been an important inspiration for me. Her work helped me think about the intimacy between body and earth in a way that feels physical, quiet, and unresolved. This project grows from those influences, but also from my own belief in fate — the feeling that the body may already carry meanings long before we know how to name them.
Surfaces
Veins / Roots
Knee / Tree Knot
Wrist Tendon / Tree Grain
Skin / Bark
Traces
Rubbings
The rubbings carry texture from one surface to another. Unlike the camera, which observes from a distance, a rubbing is made through direct contact. It records pressure, friction, and the act of touching a form closely enough for it to leave a trace behind.