Maiden China, Book of Changes, 2026
It is painful to see how quickly we have become inured to the daily stories of lawlessness and corruption. It’s so brazen now, they’re not even trying to hide it. For some solace, I have dived into history.
Confucius lived in a time of great decline, when an old civilization fell into rival armies, and strongmen took over the palaces and courts. While he wandered between courts, looking for an appreciative patron for his counsel, he failed to find one, often leaving a court in disgust at how things had changed.
In his self-exile, Confucius turned to history and poetry to find solace. He developed his thoughts into aphorisms about the moral life, about the patterns we may attempt to follow to lead us to a civilized society. His teachings form the bedrock of Chinese lives today, so enmeshed in its culture that it’s visible, in the way people talk to each other, even in the way the old people walk down the street. From the despair of Confucius more than 2500 years ago came the foundation of a different history for the Chinese, with a legacy unspooling even today.
This sculpture is about reckoning, about the possibility of change. History can begin to move with the refusal of present wrongs, with the birth of ideas for a different future, in the painfully slow rise to a more just society.