Fish Tale Tally

1 I’m sitting at the table with the Teller of Tall Tales. I’m listening to a story of him escaping a desert island. I’m slightly distracted by a swallow gathering branches that have been blown off trees. Who would’ve known that birds are such excellent sculptors? The way they forage mud, leaves, twigs, lint, plastic cords, pluck their own feathers to build nests, like how he built a raft with firewood and coconut shells. I’m blushing. How silly of me, for birds don’t need a boat to go places. 2 But my tossed lasso is nowhere to be found, so I take everything at face value. Embalming ropes with the sweat of my palms, sausage casing that holds flesh, rubber sealant that smells like spoiled soup. Under the guidelines of mix ratio and curing time, I usher my swaddled speech bubbles like leading termites out into the night sky. Open bedroom door, turn off bedroom light. Turn on living room light, close bedroom door. Open balcony door, turn off living room light. The buzzing cloud dissipates, dropping a million transparent anchors for the night. 3 I once saw a cuttlefish being captured. When it left the sea, it spat out all of its ink and appeared transparent. The cuttlefish died soon after, but its skin began to slowly emit ink dots that moved throughout the body like flocks of birds. Three hours later it was covered with intricate patterns of dots, like messages returned after death. Return. I often return to the image of these dots coming together and breaking apart, the strange tempo and silence in which they moved, the way they sat underneath the rubbery surface. Through objects and installations, Michelle Chang Qin (Chongqing, 1996) depicts labor, its process and products, as offerings to a great absence: amputated speech, forgotten rituals, partial histories that escape a collective memory but leave ineffable weights. Drawing on the material and gestural vocabularies of an assembly line, she proposes sculptural instruments of pauses and repetitions. Threads can be woven densely or sparsely to create fabrics of caring, ornament, filtration, or trapping and disguise. Sourced from makeshift spaces of temporary facilities and interim structures commonly used in sites of production, her work imagines perpetual in-betweenness and fluidity that echo the unfinished thoughts and wandering avatars of a person engaged in monotonous tasks.