RUIZHI LIU
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
04: Echo of Emptiness 2025
This project explores the relationship between time, history, and media, as well as the evolution of human spirituality across eras. The wooden fish (mokugyo), a Buddhist ritual instrument symbolizing spiritual practice and awakening, is reimagined here not through traditional woodcarving, but via a unique process: over the course of a month, I transcribed the Heart Sutra daily onto discarded ephemera from modern life—supermarket receipts, tickets, invoices—bearing traces of consumption. These papers, interwoven with religious scripture and transactional records, were then processed into pulp and molded into the form of a wooden fish. The object becomes both a material reconstitution and a product of spiritual labor, reflecting the tension between faith and the banality of contemporary existence.
The Heart Sutra declares, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” (śūnyatā), suggesting the impermanence and fluidity of all phenomena. When the wooden fish is digitized and subjected to iterative rephotography on screens, its image undergoes irreversible mutations. This process visualizes the concept of “emptiness”: each reproduction reconstructs the original data, with color shifts, pixel dislocations, and morphological disintegration mirroring how history is rewritten and memory remade. As the image degrades through cumulative replication, the wooden fish grows alien, metaphorizing the alienation of human spirituality in a technological age.
Across eras, spiritual crises manifest differently—religious devotion, ideological fervor, consumerism. Today, information overload and fragmented cognition wrought by technology fracture coherent inner worlds. The wooden fish’s progressive distortion through rephotography symbolizes this erosion. The work interrogates how images, mediated by time and technology, detach from their original meanings to become unstable visual residues. It is both a critique of digital visual regimes and a reflection on modern faith, memory, and historical narratives—asking what endures when forms dissolve, and what truths persist when symbols mutate.