Mar. 2026/ What is sculpture? / Khia Hong
What is sculpture?
Sculpture is when you're cuddling with the person you love, your face buried violently in their chest, therefore not seeing anything but darkness, but seeing more than ever, because this time you are seeing with your entire body but your eyes, sealing your skin with their skin, leaving barely any space in between, except for a tiny pocket of space to breathe in, and you feel as if these corporeal boundaries we each own are not real, or more so that they're meaningless, that talking feels meaningless, silly, stupid, because we are simultaneously there, existing in this very small but specific coordinate concurrently, and my attention is fully on them and vice versa, like when that eternal unknowability of the Other falls apart and I think, goddamn, I actually am kind of experiencing the world from outside my body, like isn't this the closest I will get to experiencing that, but then it's not really "outside" my body because in that moment I am still inside my body except that I exist in theirs as well, so it's more of an expansion of the Self, but you just feel this immense sense of comfort, from every inch of your body being pressed against this hefty, warm thing, like as if something as terrifying as death won't be so terrifying after all if I could just die like that, and I dig my fingers into their sides or back or belly, wherever is the most velvety and cushiony, and feel the scales on my fingertips brush against them, indulging in that richness of texture, feeling the gradual transmission of warmth onto mine, my fat, muscles, bones, my nerves, thinking about how beautiful and poetic it is that the world works like that, that when two different temperatures meet they slowly and quickly lose themselves to become one another, while wondering how my cold fingertips will feel on their skin, fat, muscles, ones, heart, and mind, but then being slightly disturbed by the thought because l' realize I will never know, I will never know what it feels like to be in my arms, to be caressed by my fingers, I will never get to feel my cheeks on my lips, will never be able to stare into my own eyes, which is so absurd that the absurdity spreads to my brain, to my nerves, to my bones, muscles, fat, skin, the infrathin fuzz, the hefty, warm thing around me now is strangely different, gravity separates, their west is my east, the comfort is uncomfortable, the warmth I sense is not mine, it feels like the leather carseat underneath my butt, the skin that I'm rubbing can only be rubbed because it is rubbing me, the sky turns because the earth turns because the sky turns, and we can only see it that way because we can only experience the world from our stupid, janky bodies that can’t even last a hundred years, which is cursed with a real, full-blown sickness of being overly conscious, with an ego that thinks dubito ergo cogito ergo sum, with the delusional audacity to also claim that I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think, that maybe it all does reduce down to the question of to be or not to be, because I am stuck in my body, which is aging and withering at every moment, which will stop working entirely one day, one day I will wake up and it will be the very last day I wake up, and it's not even that far away, it's so inevitable and absolute yet I can't believe it, that I picture a Richard Serra falling on me, that's what I imagine death to feel like, and it's literally going to happen to everyone, all my loved ones, they will die, I will die, I will watch them die, and the only way to avoid that is to have them watch me die first, and at the end, regret, despair, horror is unavoidable, it's only a matter of time, it cannot be that I should die and the world will go on infinitely, like the sky above me, but what is infinity, it's too terrifying to actually think about, that I start praying, dear Mary, protect me from infinity.
