Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere (2016–2020) is a collaboration by poet and visual artist Jen Bervin and filmmaker Charlotte Lagarde. The multi-channel video and textile installation, self-described as a “feminist listening room,” focuses on Chinese poet Su Hui and her 4th-century reversible poem, “Xuanji tu” (Picture of the Turning Sphere). Structured on an astronomical gauge and stitched in five colors, the poem was written in a 29 x 29-character grid and can be read in many directions to yield almost 8,000 possible interpretations.
The form of the poem is structured on an astronomical gauge that charts planetary movement around the North Star; the red regions of the poem refer to moveable rings of the armillary sphere. This poem was also a textile, 8 x 8 inches in size, rendered in silk in five colors in woven or embroidered brocade. The number of colors corresponds to a Chinese philosophical concept of cosmic and earthly interaction: Wuxing, or Five Element Theory. The original poem was lost; accounts and versions of the poem remain, later versions add one implied character to the empty center: 心 (xin, translated heart/mind).
Bervin and Lagarde partnered with a contemporary embroidery studio in Suzhou, China, to commission two new renderings of the poem using a specialized double-sided silk embroidery technique on translucent silk screens. As you enter the installation, a large video projection shows the poem being recreated by Yu Yujuan, an expert in this technique in Suzhou, China. Filmed from below the embroidery frame, the projection shows the image the embroiderer does not see but is making perfectly by touch as she passes the needle through the translucent cloth from the hand above to the hand below. This exceedingly delicate, precise operation she does without knots, securing the beginning and the end of the thread within her embroidery of the written character. In a nearby vitrine, the two finished embroideries are on view.
Bervin and Lagarde created a rotation of four projected videos featuring commentaries on the poem from eight Chinese women: an algorithmic game theorist, calligrapher, art researcher, astrophysicist, artist, novelist, and literary scholars. The projections rotate with each speaker. In the center of this square, the viewer embodies the poem’s center and rotates slowly counterclockwise/ planetary to watch the video.
This collaboration between Jen Bervin and Charlotte Lagarde produced by Violet du Feng premieres in the survey exhibition, Jen Bervin: Shift Rotate Reflect, Selected Works (1997–2020) curated by Kendra Paitz at University Galleries of Illinois State University, on view from August 15 through December 13, 2020. The exhibition and catalogue are supported by an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The research for this project was supported by an Asian Cultural Council research travel grant to Suzhou, China, Swell Foundation, and a Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artist Fellowship.
苏蕙 Su Hui (Poet); 璇玑图 Xuánjī tú (Picture of the Turning Sphere); 回文诗 huíwén shī (reversible poem); 心 xin (heart, mind); 五行 wuxing (five element theory)