Anatomy of Melancholy

2025- ongoing

My grandmother spent her final years navigating the slow erosion of Alzheimer’s and depression, yet she never received systematic clinical treatment. In China, "depression" as a clinical diagnosis was virtually non-existent in the public lexicon before the 1980s; it has only begun to enter collective consciousness within the last decade. The stigma surrounding mental illness and the lack of social integration in Chinese society have compelled me to reflect on how we perceive and articulate “melancholy."

This research project explores the intricate intersections of bodily perception, social evaluation, nomenclature, and history, as well as the evolution of social support systems. Borrowing its title from Robert Burton’s 400-year-old book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, this project re-examines how melancholy is constructed through the lenses of storytelling, labor, gender, and social class.

1 - { Prologue }: On the brink of the wet void, there burns a sun 

( coming soon)

When re-reading Kenneth Gross’s Puppet, I caught the word pupa. It is the Latin root of "puppet," used to describe the transitional stage of an insect—waiting in silence within a hard chrysalis for its wings to take shape. In that moment, for the first time, I connected my feelings about puppets—existing in a threshold state, neither human nor object—with another living organism. It is a state that is passive, clumsy, isolated from the world, yet utterly undefinable.

A decade ago, with zero background in sculpture, I decided to learn puppetry. The catalyst was a performance by puppeteer Philippe Genty: the clown Pierrot calmly severed every string suspended from his body, then collapsed with a sudden thud. In that split second, a surge of emotions—freedom, control, melancholy, solitude, elegance, and helplessness—pierced through me all at once, as if threading through the eye of a needle. I call this my moment of "meta-revelation."

Narratives surrounding puppets span thousands of years, continuously filling new bottles with these timeless touches. Yet human "melancholy" is far more complex. It is not merely a metaphor, nor does it possess a visual form—it is far more elusive, like that very pupa residing deep inside every human body, one that has decided to cease growing, remaining lodged within the abdomen.

The chapter Melancholy Puppets functions as an anthology of short stories. From the self-mutilation and spousal murder of Xu Wei in the Ming Dynasty (《十白賦》, 《幻翳》, to Munch’s exhausted female nude model (Eclipse of the Sun), to the love between Cupid and Psyche in ancient Greek mythology (Cupid and Psyche), I immerse myself in playing the role of a story collector—overlapping cross-temporal, cross-geographical human nature with my own soul.