ABOUT

Ash refers to the ashes of death: “In the cycle of life, one goes back to where one came from, all souls return to their creator.”

Ash consists of new works from the same series that were photographed from 2010 until the recent years. Divided into three parts - Still Life, Shan Shui and Scenery, the series portrays still and moving objects in daily and natural spaces and their transient changes - weathering, decaying, aging and growing. Symbolized by the pine tree on the cover of the book - a tree trunk connects all parts of the book together, and the photographs stacked on top of each other are bound together into the book like a staircase. The book is printed in duotones with black and gray and each photograph is printed with glossy varnish, matte varnish or special color varnish, depending on the delicate state of each object photographed by Muge.

"When I used the large format camera to re-understand my hometown as it is now, I’ve discovered that all things in the real world derive from our internal desire: the Karma cycle of yearning for nature, destroying nature, and mending nature (...) These images are taken from the understandings gleaned from my daily life, conveying the traces of time and history in nature, and a person’s thoughts of the future when faced with reality". — Muge