Honor

Honor was a 3 year long spiritual journey for me. Honor is a 47-minute-long video installation of burning incense. The incense had a “go back to China” design screen-printed on the surface and the act of burning these incense sticks while being trapped in a closed off room with them forced me into a deeper trance of meditation. I was reminded of being at my grandfather’s funerals, being stuck in the kneeling position for hours with incense smoke blowing into my eyes. Once the incense sticks stopped burning (Figure 29), the smoke lingered along with the smell of agarwood. I was glad it was over. The hate speech tagged onto the incense sticks were gone and I felt freed of it, I felt freed of the anger in my heart in response to those hate messages. I felt at peace and compelled to create more work that would rid my heart of the sadness and anger that built up the past few years.