STEP 1
Reading for a Hidden Structure
The project began by reading Nalan's poems beside accounts of his brief life and the social order around him. The aim was not to illustrate individual lines, but to find the emotional structures that return across love, grief, friendship, duty, and distance.
STEP 2
Six Words, One Life
Six characters from one snow poem became a map: Root, Love, Cold, People, Parting, and the Pass. Each word names both an episode and a pressure—something desired, inherited, lost, or held just beyond reach.
STEP 3
Painting the Six Fragments
The paintings translate biography into atmosphere. Edges dissolve, figures recede, and colour behaves like memory: vivid at the centre, unstable at the boundary. Together they form one life seen through six emotional climates.
STEP 4
Growing the Root
For the Root poster, lines of poetry become branches. Language is no longer placed on the image; it constructs the image, growing upward while remaining tied to the conditions that produced it.
STEP 5
Read Me Closely
A perforated light object asks the viewer to change distance. From afar it is a quiet lamp. Up close, cut characters reveal an image held inside—reading becomes a physical act of approaching, focusing, and looking through.
STEP 6
A Poem to Take Away
Six folding pieces turn each theme into something held in the hand. Missing and cut-away characters interrupt the poems, asking the reader to complete meaning through absence as much as through print.
STEP 7
From Object to Atmosphere
The final stage expands image and object into a spatial proposal. Editorial panels, a booth, light, temperature, scent, and sound are composed as one journey through a life that appears privileged, yet feels persistently elsewhere.
