Cici Wu's Memory Lanterns
Her flickering, hollow, and bandaged forms trace histories embodied across generations.
In Cici Wu’s exhibition at 47 Canal, Auld Lang Syne (prelude), a 16mm projector sits behind a flickering image of Princess Bari, the Korean goddess who guides souls into the afterlife. Yet the projector isn’t conjuring her image, nor any narrative.
The projector and the shamanic deity are among 11 lantern sculptures made of bamboo, willow withies, and mulberry paper, glowing from within and illuminating the otherwise pitch-black basement gallery. One descends into a large room to find a warmly lit clock floating above, the Buddhist goddess Kuan-yin seated on a white pedestal, and a friendly-looking creature sleeping on the floor.
A lantern painted with ink and watercolor, shaped like a miniature schoolhouse, is modeled on an archival 1914 photograph of an all-girls’ high school in Shizuoka, Japan. The site is the subject of Wu’s forthcoming film. Wu’s translations between sculpture, painting, and film curiously mirror the transnational movements of Auld Lang Syne, the titular song orchestrating the rhythm of the lightbulbs. The 18th-century Scottish song of fellowship introduced through missionary activity and colonial exchange became a Korean patriotic anthem under Japanese colonialism. Today in Japan, it signals the close of a workday in retail shops. In the exhibition, only an unconscious, haptic presence of this displaced history remains.
