Lotus from Sacred Book

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Father’s Bible, red waxed thread
2025

“May the lotus be their seat, so that when ancestors depart this world, their feet find steps upon golden blossoms, to carrying them gently toward the light.“ (希望以蓮花為座，讓遠行的先人離開這世間時可以腳踏金蓮).

This piece, Lotus from the Sacred Book (2025), examines my relationship with my father’s Bible, which I inherited after his passing. Although I grew up going to church with my dad and have read my own Bible from cover to cover several times, I no longer abide by the Christian faith.

My conflicting feelings about the sacredness of objects have led to a continual struggle—to both honor the relics passed down to me and to take seriously the role of their keeper.

When my father’s oldest brother passed away a few years ago, our family observed his departure through a seven-week Buddhist–Taoist period of rituals and prayers. During one ritual, we gathered to fold paper lotuses as offerings for my uncle on his journey into the next realm. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of these paper lotuses adorned his altar in a rented room at the funeral home until they were burned as an act of transference to him in the spirit world.

I remember how loving and comforting that ritual felt. My father was buried in a Christian cemetery, but our family also honored him with the seven-week rite.

I took a knife and cut 18 pages out of this sacred book, the Sacred Book of my father, an irreplacible artifact from my lineage past. I folded a lotus blossom as an act of remembrance. The loss of a loved one and memories of them are not preserved in material. No object is more sacred than our longing and memory. It’s through remebrance that keeps them with us.