Still Night Thoughts (cheesecloth), 2026
cheesecloth, silk thread, woad tea
9 x 11.5”
based on the poem 靜夜思 (Quiet Night Thoughts) by the exiled chinese poet 李白 (Li Bai, 701-762).
my translation of the poem would read:
bright moonlight before my bed
at first i mistook it for winter frost
i raise my head to gaze at the bright moon
i lower my head and long for home
this was the first poem i was taught to memorize, just before i emigrated to the u.s. i could say the sounds of this poem even when i lost whole worlds of the chinese language. this is an ongoing attempt to speak the poem into material, and learn the text of it as bodily gesture. no knots were used, the stitches are set with woad tea. the silk thread in this piece was handspun and dyed by a fellow queer asian diasporic artist.
z. serena qiu is a textile & fiber artist 