"T Here"

White furniture of a wood-like quality is carefully placed in a clean spacious house. The scene is complemented by an extended view of a lawn just through the door while the sky outside bathes in an orange pastel of a setting sun. This is your home sweet home. It has everything. Everything but people. Ever since my daughter was born, I have been forever musing about death. Why are paper offerings, things we can’t bring with us to death, crafted to signify anything and everything we consider shiny and golden? Housing has already become a speculative market for the living, yet why do our desires still refuse to cease in the afterlife? So I began taking pictures of paper offerings. In Taiwan, I came upon a paper house. It had everything a person would need, as if burning it to ashes would allow the dead to move in and have a life just like ours, as if death had never happened. What exits from the windows is not light but the ambiance; it’s not the setting sun but the emptiness of wooden colours. You push the window open and feel death under your fingertips. You peek inside the paper house and see images of yourself overlapping one another – you sleep, you wash, you dress, and you slowly drink a glass of water in the living room. It’s all part of your daily life – cold and warm, life and death. Are you here or there? Where are you exactly? “I remembered you in that sadness of mine that you know.” You then witness a dream, or you might already be in one.