Cici Wu's Memory Lanterns
Her flickering, hollow, and bandaged forms trace histories embodied across generations.
In Cici Wu's exhibition at 47 Canal, the artist presents Auld Lang Syne (prelude), an installation featuring a 16mm projector behind a flickering image of Princess Bari, the Korean goddess who leads souls to the afterlife. However, the projector and the deity are not conjuring imagery or narrative; instead, 11 lantern sculptures made of bamboo, willow withies, and mulberry paper stand in the darkened basement gallery, emanating light within.
As one descends into a spacious room, a warm-lit clock hovers above, Kuan-yin, the Buddhist goddess, sits on a white pedestal, and a gentle creature rests on the floor. An ink and watercolor lantern shaped like a miniature schoolhouse, inspired by a 1914 photograph of an all-girls' high school in Shizuoka, Japan, completes the scene.
Wu's artistic approach—translations between sculpture, painting, and film—mirrors the transnational movements of Auld Lang Syne, the song that became a Korean patriotic anthem under Japanese colonialism and, in present-day Japan, signals the end of a workday in retail shops. The exhibition, however, leaves behind only an unconscious, tactile presence of this displaced history.
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