Process

Carrying a silver suitcase, I walk from the snow into an experimental space.

I sit on a chair and arrange the experimental apparatus: test tubes and a timer.

A 15-minute countdown begins.

I start to weep and collect my tears using laboratory test tubes.

I repeat this four times, for a total of 60 minutes.

The tears from each quarter-hour are collected separately into four test tubes.

As time passes, the tears gradually freeze.

I seal and preserve the tears, then take them away.

Artist Statement

Four Quarters of Sorrow is a performance work within the series Daoist “Chronic Suicide.” It examines a fundamental contradiction between Eastern and Western approaches to emotional processing, and the cultural conceptions of the body that underpin them. The series is grounded in the Huangdi Neijing theory of “the five emotions injuring the five organs”—joy injures the heart, anger the liver, rumination the spleen, fear the kidneys, and sorrow the lungs. This work focuses specifically on sorrow.

I place myself inside a minimalist “laboratory,” using the precision of scientific instruments—timer, test tubes—to carry out a taboo within an Eastern regimen of self-cultivation: the deliberate induction and release of sorrow. Drawing on the Chinese medical idea that “sorrow injures the lungs,” the work treats 15 minutes as one quarter and sustains deep crying across 60 consecutive minutes. The tears from each quarter-hour are collected separately; over time, they cool and congeal naturally.

The process forms a paradox: emotional catharsis—often framed as a “cure” in Western therapeutic contexts—can appear, within Daoist and Chinese medical worldviews, as a depletion of vital energy, akin to a form of slow suicide. Through this ritualized self-observation, intangible and private sorrow is materialized into four cold, numbered specimens. The audience is invited to reconsider emotion through the contrasting gazes of two cultural systems.