Tai Shan • Hong Mao: Weight of Air takes its title from a classical Chinese saying: that death may be as heavy as Mount Tai, or as light as a goose feather, and that the difference lies in how it is carried, and for what.

The saying has long been used to distinguish between deaths that carry meaning and those that are forgotten. In many places across the world, lives lost in the pursuit of freedom risk being rendered weightless, unacknowledged, quietly erased. This work sits with that reality.

A single goose feather is fragile, almost invisible. But gathered together, they form something that cannot be dismissed. The installation holds this tension between the singular and the collective, the ephemeral and the enduring, to reflect on breath, life and the political dimensions of mourning. Chi (氣) moves through all of it: the invisible force that connects a body to the world, and that can be taken away.

The work invites audiences to move through the space slowly, to feel the subtle presence of what might otherwise go unnoticed.

The exhibition opened with a performance in two parts. First, a solo movement work in which my body became a vessel for the work’s central ideas. Then the audience was invited to participate, through collective breathing, beginning with a single feather, we became a mountain together.

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Tai Shan • Hong Mao: Weight of Air was presented as a solo exhibition at Gallery Lane Cove, Sydney, 2025. The opening performance was subsequently repeated for a panel discussion.