Yimei(Emair) Zhu
余｜重
Gravity
- 2026
- Installation
When a body is no longer present, can what it leaves behind still carry gravity?
Gravity centers on an antique steelyard scale and a single sheet of paper. The original scale pan is replaced by a suspended sheet carrying fragments of the artist’s grandmother’s handwriting: prescriptions, Buddhist texts, song lyrics, phone numbers, and family birth dates. Through these fragments, a life becomes visible not as a complete narrative, but as a fragile remainder.
The paper is physically light, yet the scale tilts as if responding to a weight beyond material measurement. The work approaches paper as both vessel and residue: the transformed body of a tree, holding the traces of another life. Using weighing as a perceptual and material framework, Gravity examines what happens when memory, touch, and intimate attachment exceed systems of measurement.
Perhaps we can never know how much a life weighs. But after someone is gone, we sometimes begin to feel that weight more clearly than ever.
While going through my grandmother’s belongings, I found that she had carefully calculated and recorded the “weight of destiny” for each of her children and grandchildren. What moved me was not what those numbers were supposed to predict, but the act of calculation itself. Some results filled her with pride; others made her quietly worry about us. The numbers stopped being predictions for me and became traces of care—love hidden inside calculation, anxiety, and hope.
Gravity reproduces these handwritten notes on transparent plastic sheets suspended from an antique Chinese steelyard scale. A tool made to measure physical weight now holds the traces of something that cannot be so easily measured.
Visitors are invited to shine a flashlight through the work. As light passes through the transparent writing, the words disappear, while refracted, shimmering forms emerge on the wall—intangible, yet visibly present.
Just as light enters the eye and allows us to see the world, perhaps love works in the same way. We may not see it directly, but through it, things that were once invisible begin to take shape.
Gravity 1.0
