Hong Kong: Tai Kuwn

Reading with Echo

Studies on The High Priestess, The Empress, Strength, and Justice

Green Snake: women-centred ecologies

20 Dec 2023 - 01 April 2024

Since 2015 we engage in Poethical Readings: collaborative readings that address questions concerning the current global situation by using a combination of already-existing and newly-invented healing and reading techniques, including astrology, philosophy, palm reading, herbal healing, fake therapy, political therapy, Reiki, and tarot reading. From the outset, our practice is oriented by the question: how to image ethics with/out the modern subject?

Reading with Echo is a new iteration in our collaborative practice that continues to be guided by the same question. For the past four years we have been working to develop a new reading tool for our Poethical Reading’s toolbox: the Echo Tarot Deck. The process of composing the Echo deck is itself a reading practice since it is inspired by our poethical readings of Ai Ogawa’s poems, having only the poems themselves, our Tarot decks, Reiki Reading, and our intuition as guides for the creation of the deck. 

The concept for this installation reflects the latest state of the process of developing the Echo Tarot Deck. What you see is a presentation of the elements that enter in the creation of the images for four major arcana - The High Priestess, The Empress, Strength, and Justice.  These images come from the reading of the artworks in the group exhibition Green Snake* in which we identified images which correspond to the meanings of these four cards as well as their related elements: 

The High Priestess:         Water     ⇔   Infinity        ⇔    Flow

The Empress:                  Earth      ⇔  Generosity  ⇔    Spiral

Strength:                          Fire        ⇔   Syntony      ⇔    Synodial curve

Justice:                            Air          ⇔   Implicancy  ⇔    Crack

The installation presents an image arranging the four tarot cards and their interpretation, with pieces of the corresponding artworks, as well as an audio recording of our reading of the image. The images are designed by Arely Amaut.

*Green Snake: women centred ecologies is curated by Kathryn Weir and Xue Tan with assistant curators Tiffany Leung and Pietro Scammacca.