Bringing Death Back into Life
The title of this exhibition, Bringing Death Back into Life, seeks to break a long-standing taboo surrounding the very mention of death. "Death"鈥攁 singular, heavy word鈥攊s often avoided in everyday vocabulary, as if its mere utterance might summon unavoidable sorrow and dread. It carries the pain and weight of fear, grief, loss, regret, bereavement, repression, deprivation, helplessness, and even total despair. To speak of death is to tread the threshold of shadow and light. In Chinese culture, this aversion has given rise to a vast repertoire of metaphors, metonymies, euphemisms, and rhetorical devices designed to soften the sting of speaking about death aloud. In ancient times, the words used to describe death varied according to social status. The death of an emperor was b膿ng, evoking the collapse of a mighty mountain; the death of a scholar-official was referred to as b霉 l霉, marking the end of a state stipend and the cessation of public life; while only the death of commoners was marked by the word "die" itself鈥攕菒. In modern days, the phrase q霉 sh矛鈥�"to depart from the world"鈥攈as become the favored euphemism, lending a gentler tone to what remains an unsettling reality. Even "death education" has adopted a softened lexicon, rebranded as "life education," to sidestep direct engagement with mortality. This exhibition, however, chooses to confront death head-on鈥攏ot for the sake of sensational provocation, but to restore death to its rightful place within the continuum of life, inviting us to view death as not the negation of life but rather an encoded extension of being alive.
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The title of this exhibition, Bringing Death Back into Life, seeks to break a long-standing taboo surrounding the very mention of death. "Death"鈥攁 singular, heavy word鈥攊s often avoided in everyday vocabulary, as if its mere utterance might summon unavoidable sorrow and dread. It carries the pain and weight of fear, grief, loss, regret, bereavement, repression, deprivation, helplessness, and even total despair. To speak of death is to tread the threshold of shadow and light. In Chinese culture, this aversion has given rise to a vast repertoire of metaphors, metonymies, euphemisms, and rhetorical devices designed to soften the sting of speaking about death aloud. In ancient times, the words used to describe death varied according to social status. The death of an emperor was b膿ng, evoking the collapse of a mighty mountain; the death of a scholar-official was referred to as b霉 l霉, marking the end of a state stipend and the cessation of public life; while only the death of commoners was marked by the word "die" itself鈥攕菒. In modern days, the phrase q霉 sh矛鈥�"to depart from the world"鈥攈as become the favored euphemism, lending a gentler tone to what remains an unsettling reality. Even "death education" has adopted a softened lexicon, rebranded as "life education," to sidestep direct engagement with mortality. This exhibition, however, chooses to confront death head-on鈥攏ot for the sake of sensational provocation, but to restore death to its rightful place within the continuum of life, inviting us to view death as not the negation of life but rather an encoded extension of being alive.
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