In a highly mediated world, how is lived experience being transformed?
As contemporary life is increasingly permeated by technological logic and market mechanisms, people are imperceptibly being separated from their own bodies. In an ancient legend carried in the Daba scriptures¹, it is language, this first mediation, that opens the first such gap out of chaos.
In the solo exhibition A Forgotten Thing: Notes Towards Learning from the Past, the artist Haha Wang (b. 1993, China) takes as her starting point a five-month residency in southwest China, focusing on the practices of the Daba and the Dongba² and exploring the linguistic and ritual traditions of the Mosuo and Naxi peoples³. In these traditions, oral chanting, pictographic writing and ritual objects form a unified, living ecosystem. Drawing on her background in sculpture, Wang asks: “Within these traditions, were the earliest forms of writing also the earliest sculptures? Do writing and sculpture share the same origin?”
The artist does not regard ritual objects as static things, but as a form of theatrical agency, exploring how ritual forms give material shape to the intangible and negotiate the real predicaments of human life. Wang does not romanticise these local cosmologies as a nostalgic refuge, nor does she treat them as a fixed origin to which one might return. Instead, she understands this ancient technique as a dynamic, relational “technology of mediation.”
Moving between the roles of witness, learner and narrator, the artist leads viewers, through this multi-channel video and spatial installation, into a moment when “words and things knew one another”, and asks: what possibilities of connection might be unearthed anew from these forgotten things?
¹ The Daba scriptures (Daba jing) are the ritual texts of the Mosuo, transmitted orally by the Daba, the name given by the Mosuo people around Lugu Lake to their ritual specialists.
² Dongba is mostly the Naxi name for ritual specialists, found chiefly in the western dialect region; their scriptures are written in pictographic characters.
³ The Mosuo and the Naxi are close in language and culture. In the official ethnic classification, Mosuo in Yunnan are counted as part of the Naxi, and Mosuo in Sichuan as part of the Mongol ethnic group.