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 like a shroud across the space. Its form draws from traditional Chinese funeral décor, standing in stark contrast to the red bridal veil prepared for the bride. Beneath these opposing fabrics, the performance unfolds: a “ghost bride” sits before a mirror. Her wedding belongs to a funeral that was never hers. The red makeup accumulates in vain—layer upon layer—yet evades the capture of the infrared camera, dissolving at the threshold between visibility and disappearance.

The work references the enduring custom of “ghost marriage” still practiced in parts of rural China—a macabre ritual that conflates marriage and funeral rites. In many cases, the family of an unmarried man who has died young seeks a female corpse as his bride to continue the ancestral line. As cremation replaces burial, the trade in female corpses has intensified: the price of a woman’s body has soared, and incidents of corpse theft and even murder for corpses have emerged.

From the perspective of the “ghost bride,” the work probes what may be called the necrotechnics of entombment—the symbolic and material operations through which the dead are made absent in order to remain effective. In the logic of cáng (藏)—to conceal, to deposit—the act of sealing the tomb performs a double gesture: it exposes the cavity, then negates it. Everything contained within—the corpse, the goods, the images, even the air—is transposed from the realm of yang to that of yin, withdrawn from visibility yet continuing to act as if alive. For the ghost bride, this mechanism translates into her own virtualization: she becomes both buried and betrothed, her body a conduit through which the living maintain their covenant with the dead.