Coal & Ash Drawings
Dragon Encircling the Mountain – Cigar Ash Drawing
Weight rises into light
Caption：
EN: Cigar ash drawing — the image is both a gesture and a trace, captured before it vanishes.
Description：
EN:
This work transforms an intimate, almost rebellious act — smoking a cigar — into a mark-making ritual. The ashes are my drawing material, leaving traces that are at once faint and dramatic. The dragon motif coils around a central mass like a mountain, evoking both Taoist cosmology and adolescent defiance.
The piece is best understood as performance residue: the act of smoking, tapping the ash, and dragging it across the page is inseparable from the final image. Photography plays a key role, capturing the drawing at its most alive moment before the ash disperses or smudges.
In this work, gesture is foregrounded: the dragon exists only as long as the ash holds its shape. The fragility of the medium mirrors the impossibility of holding on to youth, freedom, or resistance — all are consumed in the same gesture that creates them.
CN:
