Ownership is an illusion but this is true
Excerpt from the "Wear Sunscreen" song; originally an essay written by Mary Schmich, and published in 1997 in the Chicago Tribune. It was then turned into a spoken word song by Baz Luhrmann.
In 1996, Cai Guo-Qiang created eight staged “mushroom clouds” using handheld gunpowder detonations at symbolic American sites, including Nevada Test Site (a historic nuclear testing ground), land-art landmarks like Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’ (1970) and Michael Heizer’s ‘Double Negative’ (1969-70), as well as New York City’s Hudson River.
By choosing sites of monumental environmental alteration in the American West and against Manhattan’s skyline, Cai drew parallels between artistic interventions in nature and humanity’s destructive power.
‘The Century with Mushroom Clouds: Project for the 20th Century’ by Cai Guo-Qiang (1996)
Breathing in a House by Pak Sheung Chuen (白双全) (2006)
Chuen rented a modest two-person apartment in Busan, Korea, from September 1 to 10. During this ten-day period he collected each exhale into clear plastic bags, filling the entire space, then departing.
He later described the apartment as having absorbed his life, saying it felt as if he had become his own breath. Like much of his work, the piece operated without an audience and functioned as a kind of personal experiment.
A performance that became a temporary sculpture (a room filled with low-density polyethylene and air). It was presented as a video documentation of the performance that was featured in the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, under the exhibition Making (Perfect) World.
In ‘Washing River’ (1995), Yin Xiuzhen 尹秀珍 freezes ten cubic meters of polluted water from the Fuhe River in Chengdu (Sichuan Province in southwestern China), forming ice blocks which she then washes with her hands. The act is both intimate and futile: an individual gesture confronting environmental collapse. The performance exposes the tension between personal responsibility and systemic damage. As the ice melts, the contamination returns to its source, underscoring the impossibility of purification.
Komusō (虚無僧), meaning ‘priests of nothingness’ or ‘monks of emptiness,’ were wandering lay Buddhists of the samurai and rōnin class. Recognizable by their distinctive straw basket hats, which symbolized the erasure of ego, they practiced suizen (吹禅), or ‘blowing meditation,’ by playing the shakuhachi bamboo flute.
During the Edo period (1600–1868), the komusō were granted special privileges by the ruling bakufu, allowing them to travel freely across domains—an unusual liberty at the time. Their practices embodied the Zen principles of impermanence and the void, reflecting a belief that all things, including the self, are ultimately transient and empty.
