Star Travel
- Qu Chang
- Aug 30
- 15 min read
Updated: Sep 3
In early 2023, on spring break during my residency in Paris, I travelled to Bergen to see the exhibition 'Tsaiyun (Rosy-Cloud) Bridge / Forget Each Other in the Rivers and Lakes', organised by Cici Wu and her friends. Her work Tsaiyun (Rosy-Cloud) Bridge, made of bamboo strips and xuan paper, was suspended between the political propaganda of the 1960s socialist era and the faintly lingering political ideals of contemporary China, appearing at once dim and crystalline. After the exhibition, we joined a fjord tour, the details of which are but a blur. I only remember the train taking us into snowy mountains, boarding a boat, then a bus; when we returned to the city at night, an aurora appeared above us.
In early winter 2024, Berlin, I visited Cici's exhibition 'Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising' at Scheusal. Passing through a room draped with watercolour paintings, I saw sheets of xuan paper painted with wings, flowers, and birds flutter with the air currents, like ripples of water. In the dimly lit screening room, a paper horse lantern lay curled up, looking slightly weary. Facing the lantern was a video另刂 (2023), which sutured together fragments of New York, Hong Kong, and Beijing, weaving present-day realities with memories, loosely sketching a history of loss for the Chinese diaspora. That night, new to Berlin, I lingered by the small horse for most of the time, drawing from it the safety and calm of a fleeting rest.
During Qingming of 2025, Cici, our friend Echo and I stayed at Sekmai Space in Dongguan for several days, in preparation for a nighttime screening. One afternoon, just before a forecasted torrential storm, we cleaned the pond of duckweed and sorted through the former houseowner's belongings. Cici suggested we should first inform the deceased homeowner of our exhibition and plans. We lit incense beneath the most fragrant osmanthus tree in the courtyard. As the incense smouldered, a light rain fell.
Over the past three years, I often ran into Cici in different places — places of transition, places that felt like home, places of anxiety and uncertainty. Born in Beijing, Cici spent her teenage years in Hong Kong, later living and working in the United States while taking part in residencies around the world. In her essay 'Migration Positions', she speaks of the shared textures of political wounds across different geographies, proposing a ‘migratory aesthetics' rooted in the mobility of place, as a medium for ongoing expression, affect, and somatic-spiritual healing. Though I do not fully subscribe to the sustainability of constant movement, I can recognise the tidal surges of history and cycles of life that she sketches through the movement of migration. From the frequent travel familiar to professional artists, to the restless wandering and encounters of people, colliding with time and space within her works; from the neoliberal rhythm of transnational shuttling between metropolises, to the soft yet resistant notes she strikes within that very rhythm which carries its own irony, it seems that to speak about Cici and her practice always requires movement: between here and there, between people, between events and dispersals, between sharpness and softness, between critique and innocence.
As I began to organise this essay, I wondered: how can I write about her work with a language that flows, atop the flowing geographies she maps? How does one write with 'qing' (feeling) about an artist whose practice revolves around qing? For qing is the evolving permeation between subjects; and the world of qing disorients us precisely because its ceaseless movement and multiplicity of subjects defy mapping, resist the language of modernity. I find myself in need of coordinates in order to locate our travels within these fluid sites; what the coordinates represent are not fixed locations, but rather the rhythms and pulses of movement. I thought of the title of her exhibition 'Travel Star', and a short poem she wrote for the exhibition, which reads:
between rising and ceasing
of this life
between goodbye and hello
of our friendship
singing a song to the travel star
the celestial of movement is at rest
forgive us that we forgot which sense to use [1]
Perhaps stars make a fitting beginning. After all, they mark distant frontiers of our world; they are always in motion, always traceable — beams of light binding past and future. By coincidence, Echo is an avid student of astrology. We read Cici's natal chart together online, and I took the chance to locate a few planets to guide our conversations, as points of departure for a journey through her practice.
Venus in the Ninth House, Virgo[2]
square Jupiter and Uranus
In the solar system, Venus is second in brightness only to the sun and the moon. Its white light is so intense that it can cast shadows on Earth. A terrestrial planet, Venus is close to Earth in its mass, size, and distance from the sun. Owing to its radiance and proximity, it is often described as a symbol of beauty and love. Venus in Virgo in the Ninth House entwines the momentum of travel and idealism, expressing a sensitivity to a world in flux. A Venus in square feels pressure from multiple angles; its light may diffuse and drift, lacking a clear narrative or destination.
During her university years at the City University of Hong Kong, Cici studied video art and film theory; for her, light may well be the starting point for speaking about beauty and love, ideals and the world. A few days ago, she sent me a dialogue from Jean-Luc Godard's sci-fi noir Alphaville (1965), which contains the line that became the title of her early work Closer, Closer, Says Love (2017):
— So what is love then?
— Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips. Our silences and our words
Light that goes, light that returns
A single smile between us
In quest of knowledge, I watched the night create day while we seemed unchanged
O beloved of all, beloved of one alone
your mouth silently promised to be happy
Away, away, says hate; closer, closer, says love [3]
In Closer, Closer, Says Love, Cici used her light-frequency capture device 'fluffy light' to record shifts in luminosity from the film Moonlight (2016). The light with continually fluctuating intensity was projected onto the wall, illuminating an automated track suspended in space. When the light reached a certain threshold, objects on the track (leaves wrapped in silicone, strawberries, scraps of fabric) inched toward one another; as the brightness faded, they slowly drifted apart, like lovers adrift.
The movement of light is both a visible shuttling and an invisible binding that opens onto the mysterious. Across different cultures and beliefs, lanterns often symbolise summoning and passage: sky lanterns, hand lanterns, water lanterns, even jack-o'-lanterns. As a technology of light, cinema shapes reality by weaving stories and orchestrating chiaroscuro. [4] In his short essay 'Leaving the Movie Theatre', Roland Barthes describes, in bodily terms, the soft, drowsy, almost hypnotic sensation as the body exits the cinema. [5] For Barthes, although cinema, as a form of mass media, often participates in commodifying and flattening human stories, its storytelling via light and spatial atmosphere still makes up one of the rare rituals of soul-flight in our contemporary world. If 'summoning spirits' sounds too occult, we might place it within the framework of qing: the subjects called forth and set into inter-circulation by lamplight can be understood as affects. Our empathy with the characters, and the interpenetration of reality and story conjured by the projection of light, draw the absorbed viewer into a space saturated with feeling and plot.
Beams of cinematic light are a primary material in Cici's early work. As the textile of affective storytelling in our contemporary world, they either illuminate or 'inhabit' the objects the artist fashions. When moving light meets everyday objects, the latter is rendered qing-laden, like illuminated planets. In her work, the flow of light and the motion of objects converge lyrically, wavering amid the risings and fallings of intimate love and life trajectories. The constant theme that runs through Cici's work—'love'—so often rests on the ambient condition of 'movement': people and objects in transit, light in flux, the heart in a flutter. Tinted by motion, love spills out beyond familiar plots of passion and rancour, becoming a resonance stretched across longer durations and farther distances. Within tidal rhythms echoing far and near, kindred breaths, as well as familiar textures and impressions, unfolds the potentiality for qing. [6] This understanding of intimacy gives her a gentle entry point into disparate histories and memories. Time loops; distance undulates: this intimacy she calls 'love' flows steadily through her work and through the objects, people, images and notes it connects. [7]
Jupiter in the Seventh House, Cancer [8]
opposed by Saturn, Uranus, and the Ascendant
In her 2018 multimedia installation Upon Leaving the White Dust, Cici retraced Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's unfinished film White Dust from Mongolia (1980). Cha's story follows a Korean girl who grew up in Japanese-occupied northeastern China in the first half of the twentieth century. Under layered colonialist conditions, language is stripped away until she loses the ability to speak. In a voiceover, Cha identifies memory as the subject of cinema. Here, memory is not a dispersion of disembodied, weightless utterances, but a vast organism enveloping time and space, 'us' and 'them'. It is not only an aggregate of personal narratives, but a palpable, scentable body. Personal memory exists as a wound on this giant beast: it cannot render the whole, but it opens a conduit of feeling, allowing us to touch the tissue and interlaced sinews between memories. [9] Upon Leaving the White Dust experiments with the materiality of memory, and how it sutures together different individuals. Cici embeds her own childhood migrations within an installation built from Cha's storyboard. The cinematic lux of Cha's White Dust From Mongolia is projected across a neat array of objects: a porcelain sculpture of a young girl, a blurred photograph of a mother, a mother's hand, a plum pit… Wavering ambiguously between Cha's recollection and Cici's, these objects allow us to explore the texture of memory. The projector's bright square and the low shadows cast by the objects open a cut in memory that is neither strictly collective nor purely individual, but an intersubjective passage linking girl and mother, artist and artist, the Cold War and modernisation. To delve into the scar tissue of memory is to split open a shared sensorium—it is both a form of mediumship and an act of love.
In her practice, Cici focuses not only on cinema as a modern imaging technology, but also on the ancient sorcery that flickers within cinema's currents of light. She uses story-laden beams to hypnotise everyday objects, staging encounters among persons, affects, and spirits. Animated by light, charged by qing, these things connect multiple pathways along which intimacy flows: between geographies, subjects, times, and memories. They inhabit various materials and drift in different ways, such as the calf-shaped paper lantern that guides a lost boy home; the Tsaiyun bridge, under which forgotten dreams trickle; the books, bearing burning ashes lightly afloat. From here, she explores cinema's capacity to carry memory and the material properties memory expresses through film. What concerns her is not only cinema's narrative but its corporality: 'the grain of sound, the sigh of subtitles, the bundles of light', and the affective objects they condense into within everyday space, ones charged with the possibility of connection. [10] Over time, these objects in her practice have shifted from the somewhat mechanical, sculptural readymade toward lighter materials: xuan paper, watercolour, bamboo.
In her 2019 installation Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon, Cici incorporated her own cinematography for the first time. Her handling of light changed accordingly: rather than borrowing light from existing films, she implanted light both inside and outside the film (within the narrative space and the screening space). Paper lanterns she learned to make in Foshan became her medium of transmission. Yu Man Hon was among the earliest missing persons in Hong Kong after the Handover; he was fifteen and autistic when he became separated from his mother in Kowloon in 2000. Straying onto public transit through the Lo Wu checkpoint, he was mistaken by customs as mainland Chinese, and disappeared into Shenzhen, never to be found again. In Cici's film, a calf-shaped paper lantern metamorphoses into the boy's mother; accompanied by the clear ringing of a bell, it guides his soul along subway lines and ferry routes in search of a way home. Places he loved according to his mother's memory, along with snippets of dialogue from his missing-person file, become broken notes and signposts along the route. In addition to the screen, Cici placed the calf lantern and several discarded chandeliers found in a Hong Kong film-props warehouse in different corners of the gallery. Like faint stars glowing in the night sky, they gently light the gradually forgotten history of Hong Kong cinema, the child lost at the border, the mother who longs for him, and the melodies weaving together politics and humanity.
In subsequent works, Cici refitted the paper lantern as an imaging device by embedding a programmable digital camera inside, replacing the heavy, mechanical Bolex (the series 'Lantern Strike (Strong Loneliness)', 2021–). From interlaced cinematic light to the lantern's role as a spirit guide in passaging across time-space, and to the lantern carrier's movement through physical dimensions, light in her practice has grown ever lighter, more kinetic, less technologised.
The people she approaches (and loves) through her work invariably mirror herself—the woman filmmaker who has lost the ability for language; the lover desired yet out of reach; the missing child; the little stones lost in an archive. Because none of them have ever been subjects of historical narrative, their encounters are quiet and light. Viewers have to set aside their preconceptions to listen closely, feelingly, to catch, among those delicate, broken, imagined sounds, the sincerity of a long-lost human resonance. In the series 'Dislocated Love' (2023–), she takes gongbi (meticulous brush) paintings by women literati as a mirror; in repainting them, she infuses the depicted objects with different colours, threading together her moments of empathy and conversation with them. Even in the absence of literal light, xuan paper continues to interweave with luminosity through its thin, fragile grain. In Bergen, Cici stretched her paper paintings across the exhibition space's windows; the changing light outside folded into the works, recounting the wax and wane of an 'intersubjective journey'.
Saturn in the First House, Capricorn [11]
conjunct Neptune and the Ascendant
I am most intrigued by Cici's Saturn. Echo says Saturn carries a strong contracting force, standing for self-discipline and life's challenges. In the First House and Capricorn, it can read as prematurely grave, weighty, even oppressive. That is nothing like the Cici I know: an artist whose work orbits light and airy materials, someone who can at times seem overly romantic and guileless. Perhaps, as with light and shadow, lightness and heaviness come hand in hand?
For me, the work in which Cici maximises 'lightness' is a pair of ink paintings based on the film strip of Mothlight (1963) by American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The film was produced without the use of a camera; Brakhage pressed moth wings, petals, and blades of grass onto 16mm film, then contact-printed them to a projection print, producing a four-minute-long projection of light. In an interview, Brakhage called this abstract, trippy, breakably delicate film a self-portrait—an impoverished artist's relentless experiments with vision, like a moth drawn to flame; the thin membranes on film, struck by the projector's glare, disclose a profound sadness.
In Re:Mothlight (Changing Brightness 01) (2023), Cici uses gongbi technique to meticulously depict the organic moth membranes running across an entire film strip: their veins, wing ribs, thin edges, and faint hues. In Re:Mothlight (Wash Away) (2023), she stains a large sheet of paper to suggest a single moth wing. Guided by Saturn, I began to read a condensed weight within the works' lightness: the difference between tiny, translucent wings and a large painting saturated with heavy ink; the contrast between film's high-speed mechanical rotation and the deliberately slow and restrained gongbi brushstrokes. Whether in terms of time, visuality, and bodily dimensions, the tension between light and weightiness in both paintings communicates something vast and unhurried. This may be how an image-maker touches an experimental filmmaker's state of being half a century ago: ink, seeping through the fibres of xuan paper, mirrors the scorched wings and petals on celluloid.
Viewed through Saturn's melancholy, the gentle flow of light in Cici's works is never without heavy emotions, carrying fraught situations, inextricable knots of longing. In Yu Man Hon's story, her images and spaces do not chase an abstract 'lightness' by turning a speechless lost boy into an emblem of power relations in cross-border geopolitics. Instead, they flow toward the densest, least utterable feeling: a mother's heavy yearning for her child, her circling thoughts, her wish to bring him home. In the paper-lantern installation Tsaiyun (Rosy-Cloud) Bridge, early-1960s propaganda photographs are edited into a black-and-white sequence of childlike stills; little stones, grapes, seeds, and family snapshots occasionally hop through the archival images, at times like insects flitting through a book, other times like tears in memory. The work does not seek to reproduce images of political violence, but rather to show that in erasing trauma, we also scrub away our bright visions and political ideals. In her newly completed installation Lanterns from the Unreturned (2025), Cici traces the history of the building that now houses Rockbund Art Museum, where over four million books confiscated during the Cultural Revolution were stored during the 70s. Echoing the tied book bundles of the time, she created hundreds of 'book-bundle' lanterns from bamboo and handmade paper. They light up different corners of the building, and drift upward along the stairwell windows. The lanterns' lightness seems to provide some comfort to the weight of the books, while the leaves and petals embedded in the paper repeat the burning, self-consuming pain and sorrow of Brakhage's Mothlight.
The weightiness, or indeed, the politics, of Cici's work may lie precisely in the flow between 'light' and 'heavy'. Rather than underscoring moral righteousness from a binary logic of opposition, her practice seeks, through encounters with people, the circulation of qing, and the passage of light, to fuse the two, gathering airy dreams from heavy histories, tempering drifting romanticism with dense memory and humanity. Thus, violence and trauma can empathetically meet with romance and innocence; thinking and feeling, politics and humanity, can at last touch each other.
'To blow a feather or to do a sword dance before a giant monster', this was Cici's metaphor when we spoke about heaviness and lightness. It sounds a little silly, I laughed to myself then. But as I wrote this essay, I wondered whether the monster she confronts, through her lanterns, papers, films, and paintings, is not our usual preconceived darknesses: authoritarian politics, heavy histories, structural violence, modernity's erasures. Perhaps the monster is the heaviness we (and she) unconsciously carry: eroded memories, repressed feelings, cleansed knowledge, desires that cannot find words, hearts that cannot find connection. The former darkness is immune to a lithe dance. It is mechanical, disenchanted, and unable to answer to softness, kindness, or beauty. Only the latter can be stirred by feathers and sword dances, because the soul has magic.
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