Earth’s Rivers Depart

In this ink and cut-paper series, I push the limits of an extremely delicate Chinese calligraphy paper known as “Cicada Wing.” The river forms are painted in reverse on the back of the sheet, then layered with Indian marble paper on the front and additional papers on the reverse. The result is both constructed and translucent—an image that hovers within the material rather than sitting on its surface. The works are inherently fragile, and that fragility is integral to their presence.

The series is guided by a speculative fiction: what if the planet became so inhospitable to its waters that they simply withdrew? What if rivers, oceans, and currents—long subjected to human extraction, redirection, and contamination—reached a point of refusal? The premise carries a note of humor, but it also reflects a shifting reality. The anthropomorphism is intentional, a way of exposing the imbalance in how we imagine agency: we act upon water as if it were passive, even as its absence would be catastrophic.

In these works, rivers are no longer fixed within geography. They appear unstable, lifting, thinning, or slipping away—less as mapped entities than as presences in retreat. The delicacy of the materials echoes this condition, holding an image that feels provisional, as if it could vanish.

Below is The Ganges, The Mississippi, and The Nile.