The 17th Summer

A nineteenth-century Japanese flower basket, woven in the form of a cicada, became the origin of this work.

Some cicada species spend 17 years underground, almost entirely unseen, before emerging into the world. They shed the body that protected them below ground, unfold their wings and begin their brief life above it.

That extraordinary cycle became the metaphor for The 17th Summer.

The Met preserves the artwork. The cicada represents emergence and freedom.

I imagined the basket suspended between those two ideas. Preserved for generations as an object, yet carrying the symbolism of a creature whose existence is defined by transformation.

The work begins with the original artefact. Bamboo becomes fibre. Fibre becomes vein. Basket weave becomes cicada anatomy. A woman emerges, her exoskeleton constructed from the bamboo, rattan and woven language of the original basket.

She leaves the stillness of the museum and enters the living world from which those materials first came.

The work was developed in FLORA through interconnected visual studies, with the original Met artefact remaining the material and conceptual origin throughout.

The museum preserves what was. The cicada emerges into what comes next.