Hungry Ghost Festival

‘The Tales of the Hungry Ghosts’ Scroll in Kyoto Museum, Japenese, late 12th Century

One of the themes I’ve not really explored fully yet is the idea of ancestral food offerings and my experiences of seeing offerings of food and paper in Hong Kong as a child. My work around paper, food waste and composting as a deep bow feels analogous although I had come to the ideas from a different perspective: more examples of interconnectivity in my thinking. The paper cabbage leaves are both food and paper and they speak to memorialising the dead or showing respect and mutuality if not memorialising, but the phosphorescence here is a little off. I like the visual, the lacy networks and edge-less forms and the luminescence is interesting albeit a bit less clearly tied in, which I choose to see as OK at this point. I often see connections later or disregard them as indeed off point so no big judgements at this point. These paper works look more like drawings than the whole works, which I love too.

I am interested in paper effigies and paper offerings as an area of research, as this would create another avenue (another!!) for investigation. Artist Au Yeung in Hong Kong works with creating paper effigies to send off to the next life with the recently departed, from a scooter to a life size diving suit of a lost loved one who died before he learnt to dive.

If I see cabbage leaves as paper effigies, what am I gifting to the next life? Not literally cabbage I hope, I don’t really like cabbage that much. It is a symbol of form, pattern, natural process, beauty, sustenance. A symbol of a deep bow.

From Wikipedia

The Hungry Ghost Festival in Hong Kong is a festival in the late Summer of the Western calendar where the deceased are believed to visit the living and loved ones perform rituals to transmute and absolve the sufferings of their deceased. Intrinsic to the Ghost Month is veneration of the dead, where traditionally the filial piety of descendants extends to their ancestors even after their deaths. Activities during the month would include preparing ritualistic food offerings, burning incense, and burning joss paper, a papier-mâché form of material items such as clothes, gold, and other fine goods for the visiting spirits of the ancestors. Other festivities may include buying and releasing miniature paper boats and lanterns on water, which signifies giving directions to the lost ghosts and spirits of the ancestors and other deities.