“日花仔 jit-hue-á / A Slow Parting”
c. 2026
Ithaca, NY
solo exhibition
Yun Hsiang Wang presents her MFA thesis, 日花仔 jit-hue-á / A Slow Parting (2026), at the Olive Tjaden Hall, Experimental Gallery in Ithaca, New York. The exhibition explores Taiwanese funerary rituals, grief, and memory through performance, installation, photography, and archival intervention. Rooted in the traditions of Tou-qi (頭七), the first seven days after death in Taiwanese culture, the thesis approaches mourning as a prolonged process of accompaniment between the living and the deceased rather than a singular moment of loss. Drawing from theories of liminality by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, the work investigates unstable thresholds between presence and absence, remembering and forgetting, and life and death.
Through repetitive bodily gestures, coin-tossing rituals, obscured family photographs, and fragmented archival timestamps, the project examines ritual as both an embodied method of negotiating grief and a structure for sustaining memory. Rather than attempting to preserve memory intact, the work engages with its fragmentation, transformation, and gradual decay over time.
Rather than offering closure, 日花仔 jit-hue-á / A Slow Parting lingers within grief as an unresolved condition, proposing mourning as an ongoing negotiation where relationships continue to persist through ritual, repetition, and embodied acts of remembrance.