This series explores the tension between creation and disappearance. Each bird is drawn with cigar ash and coal dust — materials that are both fragile and volatile. The act of drawing is performative: the ash scatters, the gesture is recorded, and the work begins to fade almost immediately.
Together, these works form a meditation on freedom, rebellion, and impermanence. Smoking a cigar — a teenage gesture of rebellion — becomes part of the ritual: a nod to Che Guevara, to youthful desire, and to the longing for a life that resists quiet domestication.
This was the very first bird I drew with coal dust — the beginning of what later became the Bird Series. Its form echoes the tradition of Song dynasty literati bird-and-flower painting, where the goal was not realism but the revelation of personal spirit and temperament.
For me, this slightly awkward, almost absurd bird is an avatar of my subconscious: my love of birds, my longing for freedom, and my taste for narratives tinged with humor and strangeness. It marks the moment when I realized coal dust could carry not just image but attitude — a material charged with both history and play.
Cigar ash on xuan paper.
single breath scatters ash into flight. This work turns a rebellious gesture — drawing with cigar ash — into an invocation of freedom.
This work is made entirely with cigar ash — a material that carries for me a deep personal charge. I first began smoking cigars in my early twenties, fascinated by the ritual and by the figures who seemed to embody defiance, like Che Guevara. To draw with ash is to transform an act often seen as rebellious or excessive into a mark of creation.
The bird is an avatar of my subconscious: every time I use cigar ash, I find myself tracing forms connected to adolescent impulses — the urge to do something great, to refuse the quiet obedience often expected of women, to claim a freedom that is both bodily and spiritual.
In this photograph, the moment of creation is frozen: ash explodes and falls, the bird takes shape, wings outstretched, caught between appearance and disappearance. The drawing is not just an image but a residue of performance — the gesture, the breath, the risk that the ash could scatter away before fixing — all are part of the work.
Cigar ash on xuan paper.A drawing that continues to change, even after completion — time as collaborator.
This work shows the same bird weeks after it was first drawn. Exposure to air and gravity let the ash slowly fall away, softening the edges until the bird became almost ghostly. For me, this transformation is part of the piece: time is not an enemy but a collaborator, finishing what my hand began. The work becomes a living process — never fixed, never fully owned — reminding me that every attempt to hold onto freedom is also vulnerable to disappearance.
See more works in the Coal & Ash series.
