Cover Spread

Abstract

“Affliction of the Spirits”

In this art work, the visual is informed by sacral art that sweeps from the Indian subcontinent to Northeast Asia earmarking familiarity, distance, and iterations. In many Asian cultures, the spirit realm is that of the ether, nebulous, but still tethered and connected to the physical real world. In communing with the spirits, a shaman becomes a conduit to relay messages, warnings, comfort, and instructions that must serve the community. In the dizzying contemporary times of Asian global dominance and tension, the spirits are still among us. However, these are not the spiritual entities of older folklore but that of a series of connective tissues that overlap and animate the past and the current. No matter how fast and how further our technology and communication will take us to different trajectories, the multi-spiritual concept and assemblage of what makes “it” “Asian” will always be spectral and trouble our identification in a very deterritorialized realm that collapses the actual and the virtual, the body and the spirit, the here and the somewhere.  The affliction caters to the troubling of borders wherein we become spirit-like and be able to enter and course through different portals that leave our trails in our wake.