CHARWEI TSAI

The central piece of this exhibition is a six by three meters installation made with glass and mirrors in reference to The Womb & The Diamond Realm mandalas from Koyasan in Japan. Known for writing mantras on ephemeral materials, for this project, Tsai experiments with using breath and the sound of reciting one-syllable mantras to form each glass piece. These captured mantras are then placed on a circular mirror as a part of the larger mandala.

Along her journeys, Tsai encountered rural communities many of whom are under the threat of losing their livelihoods of working with natural materials and traditional crafts to hyper consumerism. As a way to honour gentler ways of working with the Earth, Tsai collaborates with craftswomen from Indonesia and Mongolia to create a body of woven and sewn mandalas. Ndewa & Hamanangu, is a series of ikat textiles made with a young weaver Nency Dwi Ratna from the island of Sumba in Indonesia through the support of curator Alia Swastika. For this ten-month project, the weaver closely followed traditional methods passed down through her mother. As a tribute to the tradition, hand-spun yarn from locally sourced cotton and plant based-dye from hand-picked native plants took the form of a local totem ‘lobster’ that symbolises re-generation. Every step of the preparation follows the natural rhythms of the land. What seems to be mundane labour manifests into sacred geometries representing the interdependence of micro and macro cosmologies.

At National Taichung Theater’s Art Corner, Tsai will create a site-specific and durational piece writing verses from the Flower Ornament Sutra on rice paper painted with natural pigments extracted from cinnabar. This work will fill the seven by five meter window panel of the opera house. Additional drawings, using pigment extracts from minerals such as azurite and malachite found in the cave paintings along the trade routes where many sutras travelled from India to East Asia during the Tang Dynasty, will also be exhibited at the main space. A publication in collaboration with Zolo Press based in Brussels & Mexico City will be released in July 2021.

A publication in collaboration with Zolo Press based in Brussels & Mexico City will be released in July 2021.