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. Retelling the myth, is ominous of examines the “corpse–ghost” continuum through overlapping religious and economic registers: a failing negotiation between body and soul, memory and oblivion, migration and the governance of the dead.

Presented at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy, 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—assimilated into the necro-bureaucracies of the yin realm through the transmission of Buddhism, and thus, the technology of reincarnation, into China.  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.”