A white drape embroidered with a couplet—“I snuggle into the wedding chamber from my tomb bed, my shin is the lintel; I snuggle into the tomb bed from my wedding chamber, my hair is the quilt, the spirit-guiding streamer”—hangs across the space. Drawing from traditional Chinese funeral décor, it contrasts sharply with the red bridal veil prepared within the same installation. Before a mirror, a “ghost bride” adorns herself. Her wedding is subordinated to a funeral never meant for her. Layers of red makeup accumulate, yet evade the infrared camera, dissolving at the threshold between visibility and disappearance.

The work references the practice of ghost marriage still found in parts of contemporary China, where marriage and burial rites converge. Families of unmarried men who died young may seek a female corpse as a bride to sustain the ancestral line. With the institutionalization of cremation, transactions surrounding ghost marriage have intensified, accompanied by grave robbery and killings committed for bodies. From the perspective of the ghost bride, the work examines the necrotechnics of entombment—the operations through which the dead are rendered absent in order to remain effective. Within the logic that to bury is to hide, sealing the tomb exposes a cavity only to negate it: bodies, objects, images, and even air are transferred from yang to yin, withdrawn from visibility while continuing to act. For the ghost bride, this process becomes her own virtualization—both buried and betrothed, her body a conduit through which the living sustain their covenant with the dead.