Monetomancy (Han Chinese ver.)

2020 -
Wall-mounted burnt joss paper, digital prints, table, office chairs, folders, stationery

Excavating the lingering presence of financial imaginaries in Han Chinese cosmology that extends all the way into the afterlife where descendants are expected to continually provide infernal currencies and offerings to  deceased ancestors, Monetomancy (Han Chinese ver.) is a chapter in a larger study on the intersection between faith, finance, and magical systems in world cultures. A portmanteau of monetary and the suffix -mancy, which denotes magic or divination, Monetomancy is an invitation to contemplate the invention of financial thinking and mechanism as an act of practical magic and magical practice.

In Monetomancy (Han Chinese ver.), the tropes of bureaucracy, endemic to imperial Chinese cultures, comes to the fore in an installation that simulates a speculative work desk of a celestial bureaucrat labouring under conditions of ironically man-made scarcity to process immigration claims into the different realms of Chinese afterlives.

A tongue-in-cheek exploration into how the state of the material and living impinges into the immaterial worlds of non-humans, this work also questions the formation of images and values as a collective and creative process, and the invention of rituals as a method of exerting a discursive form of control.