Liturgy

by Flora Yin-Wong (Artist)

Liturgy is a journey into the uncanny realm of the senses that dives into histories of perception and intuition. The artist Flora Yin-Wong deploys a variety of images and texts to explore issues related to cosmic principles, conspiracies, and parallel universes. The result is a constellatory work filled with religion, dreams, and fragmented memories and knowledge that also gestures at the artist’s own history. The book’s chapters—Rituals & Fire; Omens; Hexagrams / Oracles; Curses; Gods & Creatures; Places Doors to Hell / Ghost Cities; Paradoxes; Sound Phenomena; Reality—function like a secret dossier inflected with flights of fantasy, speaking to systems of faith and language and its corruptions.

Divining inspiration from meditation, oracles, curses, hexagrams, Cantonese traditions, and superstitions, Liturgy interweaves textual and visual collage to create a multi-layered tonality. Reflected here is the multidisciplinary artist’s interest in the web between fiction, memory, rituals, and incantation, as well as her approach to sound.

Genres: Music

120 pages, Paperback

Published June 22, 2021

Reviews

[huai]

ty Cecilia this was pretty awesome

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeously designed, eerie and disturbing — this book gives one the feeling of having been granted access to forbidden knowledge

[james !! · Rating 4 out of 5]

had no real clue what to expect from this book (i just yearn to read anything put out by artists that who’s music i love) but very glad i dived into this! the whole presentation of this book is stellar! super eerie & atmospheric which perfectly matches the content being discussed! (chose a pretty good time of year to get round to reading this)

it’s a book that demands further reading, i was pretty much exploring alternate texts / internet searches after each section. there’s so much to dive into, this book serves as a brief overview/taster so that could be a positive or negative depending on how much you want solely just from the text in-front of you. not much issues here tho, a really interesting read!!

[L]

a fascinating little collection of myths, superstitions, oddities, rituals, and recollections. i'm not sure if this was meant to be a companion piece to yin-wong's beautiful debut album 'holy palm' but i think boomkat's description of the album can also apply here: "the uncanny magick in the rift between the real world and faith-based beliefs, hyperstizing a personalised, syncretic book of sonic spells."

i would pack this for a sleepless long-haul flight and read it a few pages at a time.

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

My aunt in Hong Kong, whom we used to visit once a year, would have stories about the village, the wild dogs, and the voices in the hill where we buried our ancestors. In later years, my mother warned me not to go there again, because the corpses had built up since and would grab at my feet.

[rat · Rating 5 out of 5]

just the kind of creepy and cool and existential metaphysical stuff that i enjoy! favorite section was the one about different kinds of ghosts and supernatural beings. sometimes i feel like i want to meet one and then i remember my life would be changed forever!

[chloe]

“Dreamlike as this all is, of course, there is nowhere or nothing to go back to, safely retreat.”

I feel the parallel, sometimes, tempête électrique.