Brass, burnt acrylic color, tatami, and lacquer
88 1/4 x 181 x 108 inches
unique
She always spends long hours looking at butterflies, their thousands of species and dazzling compendiums. From Asia to South America, the same butterfly, with the same red, white, and black color scheme, transforms into countless patterns. A butterfly does not have two spots that are the same, never.
“I have a question.” He abruptly interrupts her endless wanderings about the spots.
“Like what?” She asks.
“It’s hard to say.” He stares straight at her.
“I’ve looked at you for a long time,” he says, “and still don’t know you.”
She looks at him and lowers her head again.
The tactility of the stone becomes gradually apparent to her hand, and its uneven and warm surface reminds her of the low walls on the farm in summer. She slowly feels the bumps and grits on the stone surface, enlivening her memories of the farm. The grits seem to provide evidence for the existence of those memories. But, like the spots on a butterfly, there are never two identical gravels in the world. The lingering butterfly spots in her mind and the tactility of the grits at her fingertips starts to overlap. For a moment, she wondered whether the touch from her fingers illuminated the spots, or the spots replicated such a touch. Could human memories be stored in the physical features of things that are never identical rather than in the human brain? In the dry grits of a stone, under the fragrant petals of a spring flower, or in a butterfly’s gently opening and closing wings?
Memories are as immense as the universe. The universe is a memory. We have never died, and we have never been born.
“Why do people always eat apples?” She asks him, looking up.
“They like the way apples taste?” He replied.
“No.” She stared straight at him.
“Because we don’t always know what apples taste like, and no two apples taste precisely the same.
There is no such a thing as the taste of an apple in the world.”
