Installation of branch-built tree with sagging knotted rope net, a boulder marked by handprints, and drifting smoke — reflecting on the fragility of time and the necessity of living fully rather than merely recording.

To Knot Is to Hope

To Knot Is to Hope — and Still I Push the Stone

Tension holds a quiet hope

EN:
Mixed-media installation with wood branches, knotted rope-net, pigment-marked stone, and staged smoke. Explores the fragility of time, the impossibility of total recording, and the choice to live rather than merely archive.
CN:

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EN:
This work gathers a tree of branches, a knotted rope-net, a stone with my handprints, and drifting smoke — four elements that map my meditation on time, memory, and living. The tree recalls the deep-time process of plants turning into coal, suggesting that all life is sedimented time. The knotted net references ancient record-keeping — quipu, knotting — but it sags like Dalí’s melting clocks, signaling that even our systems of memory eventually slacken and fail.
The stone is my Sisyphus: I have pushed it repeatedly, leaving white handprints as small medals of effort. This gesture is not merely symbolic; it is physical labor, grounding me in the present. The smoke drifts upward and slips through the net — a reminder that the most beautiful and poetic moments cannot be archived, captured, or posted.
In a time when life is often lived to be recorded — staged for the feed, edited into proof — this work asks the opposite: What if we simply live? What if the real task is to push the stone, to feel its weight, to breathe with the smoke, knowing it will vanish?
This installation concludes not with despair but with a stance: even though the net fails, I choose to keep knotting, keep pushing, keep living. This is my existential response: life is not a spectacle to be preserved but a task to be lived, every second an act of resistance against nihilism.

I sat under a knotted rope “tree” installation beside a stone with handprints, evoking Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the existential act of waiting.Up nextWaiting Under the Knotting Tree – Performance Still
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