Nine Suns, 2023. Custom fabricated movable wooden dollies, metal tubs, soil, and Asian herbs. Installed on Grant Avenue, San Francisco Chinatown. Ceramic sculptures by Ahn Lee. Fabrication of wooden planters by Stephen Gulau. Photography by Henrik Kam and Robyn M (last three images).
In the Chinese myth of the archer Hou Yi and the ten suns, there were once ten suns, who would each cross the sky one by one. However, when all ten of the suns appeared in the sky at once and scorched the earth, Hou Yi shot down nine of the suns, leaving just the one we have today. Commissioned for the 2023 iteration of the Edge on the Square festival in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Nine Suns imagines a gentler transformation of the nine suns who fell from the sky. This work takes the form of a modular outdoor garden installation consisting of nine circular planter tubs mounted on movable circular dollies painted to look like the suns shot down by Hou Yi.
Each planter tub contains popular Asian herbs and leafy greens (e.g., shiso, Vietnamese coriander, mizuna, etc) and is installed on top of a circular wooden disk bearing different sun designs made by myself, and modeled after celestial emblems found in East and South Asian archaeological sites and artworks from the Bronze Age to the mid-twentieth century. On the day of the Edge on the Square festival, the nine ‘suns’ were arranged on Grant Avenue in a wavy line reminiscent of an undulating horizon. In the story of the ten suns, each sun turned into a three-legged raven as it fell from the sky; here, I tried to imagine them as stars that gave rise to new life elsewhere after being shot down from the sky. With this project, I was interested in nuancing the story of the ten suns by centering the nine suns who were deemed superfluous and shot down from the sky, rather than emphasizing the ‘heroic’ archer who is usually the protagonist of this story. We are often taught to look to the stars as the next frontier, yet it is my hope that this installation might encourage viewers to spend more time tending to the earth we have as our home.
At the end of the festival, the planters were moved to Kai Ming Head Start Preschool in Chinatown, for use in the school's outdoor education program. I decided to install the planters on dollies with wheels so that they would be mobile and easily configured into different arrangements depending on Kai Ming's needs. This feature was inspired by the reality of tight space in Chinatown, as well as the interconnectedness of the community: because of the density of the neighborhood and its deep networks of support, many residents of the neighborhood are incredibly mobile, tracing numerous "orbits" a day as they go to school, work, run errands, see friends and family, and build lives with numerous nodes of connection.
If you’d like to learn more about this project and the festival, here’s an interview I did with the radio show APEX Express, on the Bay Area radio station 94.1 KPFA, alongside Edge on the Square curator Candace Huey and Macro Waves, one of the other artists in the festival.