Five walks (to and from the dream pool), 2025
the collective altar after all five rituals had taken place.
grief shape made during the second ritual (it is a pleasure to be hidden and a disaster not to be found)
Five walks (To and From the Dream Pool) was hosted by Outlook Is___ Projects in 2025. Occurring over the course of two months, the project was a community-wide invitation to participate in five embodied rituals for being with sorrow and loss. In dialogue with psychoanalyst Francis Weller’s concept of “the five gates of grief,” each ritual explored one of these gates through movement, embodied connection, collective reading and writing, and the quiet act of walking together as each person held and shaped a piece of raw clay. For this walk, participants were invited to engage in a slow, mindful journey through the neighborhood, holding and continuously shaping a piece of raw clay in their hands. Two simple instructions guided the walk: to keep the clay moving without pause, and to maintain silence (though emotional utterances were welcome!). This focus on tactile engagement and movement encouraged participants to connect deeply with their own personal embodied experience of grief and presence while moving together through public space.
The walk concluded at the gallery, where participants were invited into the ceremony of placing their clay forms on a collective altar, releasing their writing into a bowl of water, and washing their hands. Over the course of the exhibition, these clay shapes accumulated as a slow build of individual gestures—forming a quiet monument to the collective body we need in order to process complex grief.
still from first ritual (it is a holy thing to love what death can touch)
still from fourth ritual (we were not meant to live such shallow lives)
The names of the five rituals emerged organically through time spent with Weller’s text and through the process of devising the walks. They were:
1. It is a holy thing to love what death can touch
2. It is a pleasure to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found
3. A feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness would have been encountered
4. We were never meant to live such shallow lives
5. Tending the undigested grief of our ancestors
For the closing, I cut each of these phrases from clay—letter by letter—and affixed them to the gallery wall beside the altar. This gesture was inspired by my research into Bi Sheng’s invention of ceramic movable type, described in Shen Kuo’s 11th-century essay collection The Dream Pool Eassays. I was moved by this intersection of language and earth—how words might be formed, shaped, and made durable through earth and fire. Over time, language itself began to feel like a dream pool: fluid, shifting, and collective. Each ritual became its own version of this pool, a place where we moved in and out of sociality and the unconscious, as if entering and exiting a dream held in common.
The exhibition closed with a public gathering honoring everyone who participated in the durational sculpture. The evening included a reading by local writers (one of whom had lost their home in the LA fires) and a shared meal of homemade minestrone soup.
installation shot from the exhibition closing
grief shape made from the fifth ritual (tending the undigested grief of our ancestors)
PROJECT INVITATION:
"Before heaven and earth had been named, the world was a chaotic mixture of sweet and salty waters."
- Seven Tablets of Creation (The Babylonian Genesis)
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, room for relief, for misery, for joy."
- Pema Chodron, Things Fall Apart
Dear friends & family,
I'm writing to invite you to participate in any of a series of grief rituals that I'll be facilitating in April and May at Outlook Is___ Projects, as part of an art piece I'm calling five walks (to and from the dream pool).
These times are inexplicable, and while we may not have words, we do have our bodies. Our bodies know a lot, I am constantly enchanted by their vastness. When we bring our bodies together and allow them space to connect, we create the possibility for much more to happen than what we can do on our own.
Grief is an energy constantly seeking motion. It is not bigger than we are, when we are together.
I invite you to join me in exploring what's real right now together. The first one is this Sunday, March 30th from 11 am - 1 pm in Highland Park.
You can learn more & register here.
Free + please, invite friends!
xo
han
