An installation and ritual by Qiao Chu Guo exchanging paper replicas of abandoned Chinese temple statues, dissolved and reshaped with visitors’ texts, exploring materiality, belief, and modernization.

The Lasting is dissolving is an installation and participatory performance that expands on the artist’s earlier work of the same name. Replicating, in ghost form, a corner of a temple in the artist’s hometown of Jingmen, China, the work draws on a common practice: when god statues from family shrines are no longer wanted, due to a change in belief, a move, or a clear-out. People cannot bring themselves to throw them away. Instead, they bring them to the temple, where the statues wait to be “adopted” by someone else. The installation explores the tension between materialised statues and immaterial belief, between utilitarianism and spirituality. It reveals how sacred objects are displaced, bartered, and commodified through modernization, and how, even as statues are replaced, the ghosts remain.

For this project, the statues are cast in paper from molds of the original gods. As ritual agents, their bodies undergo a material metamorphosis: sent away by immersion in a sink or river, they slowly dissolve, merging back into the material cycle. The solidity and permanence of the statue is reversed, and ritual takes over where reverence and meaning once stood.