is ominous of (2022–2023) reimagines the myth of Meng Po—the goddess who, beneath the Bridge of No Return in the underworld, serves a soup that allows the dead to forget their past lives before reincarnation. Using this myth as a lens, is ominous of examines the “corpse–ghost” continuum through overlapping religious and economic registers: an unstable negotiation between body and soul, memory and oblivion, migration and the governance of the dead.

First presented at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy, as part of her graduation performance with the Dutch Art Institute, I Once Had a Duck Soup Cooked with Ginger and Wine, and Lapsed into a Comatose Suspense (2022) unfolded in a semi-stage environment of floor cushions, two screens, and a communal pot of soup. Textual narration intertwined with video footage: ducks circling in water, and two red-painted fingers moving through supermarket aisles.

Each performer embodied a Chinese character associated with a corpse or ghost (鬼, 尸, 魄, 屍, 魇), with their two toes painted red to evoke the liminality of a duck’s feet. Following a choreography that physically transliterated the pictographic characters, they circulated fabric bowls filled with soup, leaving visible traces of dark red liquid across the floor.

The single-channel video ( ) is ominous of ( ) (2023) extends the performance into a cinematic riddle. Meng Po appears not only as a goddess of the underworld but also as an immigrant, enlisted into the necro-bureaucracies of the realm of yin. Her soup holds the dead in a state of comatose suspension, caught between memory and forgetting:

“A symbol is the feet of a duck that remind you of duckness.
An omen is a clear water that submerges the feet of a duck—and there, it suspends.
I take (false) etymology as a morgue for corpses that have fallen off signification, but I sigh for the portended that has been prescribed ahead of future references.
Omens are to be taken literally.”