He Fa on the Copper-Skinned Folding-Fan Sculptor

Graphite-black pleats radiate from the shoulders, as though an open folding fan were being worn. A copper-brown face and white brows sit in front of the semicircle, while a lavender vest and narrow olive trousers stay slender. This garment gives me the width of a backdrop, and the surrounding emptiness seems to serve my outline. Radiating pleats make expansion look orderly. Each line points toward a similar origin, returning the eye to the shoulders, as though this broad area naturally belonged to me. Yet imagining a turn, a doorway or standing beside another person gives that expansion concrete consequences: where an edge will strike and who must stop first cannot be answered by the pattern's completeness.

An actual folding fan suggests the possibility of closing, but a static image cannot establish whether this cape folds away easily. I am willing to make reversibility a further requirement. If a look only takes responsibility for the most beautiful moment of unfolding, leaving folding, transport and removal for the body to improvise, it has completed only half the design.

Making something easy to put away at all costs can also weaken its force. Some works need precisely to open emphatically and occupy a place that would not ordinarily be given to them. I do not want every width reduced to a conveniently passable size. I want to ask how long this occupation lasts, whether that was explained beforehand, and whether I still have a means of adjustment when someone needs to pass.

I keep both hands outside the black pleats, so they can still deal with less grand things. The semicircle can continue to provide the face with a background, but need not maintain its maximum area forever. When the display ends, if I am willing to draw its edges in little by little myself, width can change from a territory taken for granted back into an action with a beginning and an end.