EXUVIAE, 2018

paper, papier mache, color pigment

When thinking about paper, I had the after image of an abandoned wrapping ; an empty shell, devoid of its original content. From this I focused only on how the brain immediately imagines the content of such an empty shell. I made an analogy between this idea and the cultural manifestation of the Asian dragon in Asia. In eastern culture, the dragon always has been an image without substance such as a shed skin.

The idea of the dragon always roams around in the cultures without having a concrete materiality. With the fragility of paper in mind, I decided to reinterpret the myth of the Asian dragon and to materialize it in a sort of sloughed skin, as a ghost of that mythical creature. I started to build up hollow paper structures which I treated with papier-mâché in order to translate the idea of the creature’s fragile yet hard remains, frozen in a rigid and organic shape. I then adapted this process in a more systemised manner, creating organic yet structured containers and volumes.