Twist of Mortality
THE POETIC TREATMENT OF DEATH
Qingming Festival, like many remembrance rituals across the world, is a traditional Chinese ceremony of farewell - a way of commemorating the dead, and coexisting with memory.
In facing death, we are slowly learning not to look away from its stillness, or the strange poetry it carries. There is beauty, too, in disappearance.
The burning of joss paper, traced back to the Han dynasty, evolved from burying real objects to offering their symbolic likeness in flame.
Not meant to replicate wealth, but to maintain a thread- between presence and absence, between the living and the lost. It is a ritual of remembrance, and a quiet expression of how we imagine continuity beyond death.
"As joss paper rises with the smoke, the tangible fades into the unseen - like longing, crossing distance, binding the visible and the invisible."
- GREATROAM
In traditional Chinese culture, many families keep ancestral altars at home to honor those who have passed. It is an intimate, everyday form of remembrance - allowing the dead to remain, quietly, within the rhythm of the living.
More than a site of memory, the altar sustains a silent connection across generations - a presence that threads through the space between life and death.
"We hope to create soul dwellings with warmth - spaces that honor each individual spirit, and offer quiet solace to the living."
- GREATROAM
Death is an inevitable chapter of life. Though the departed are gone, memory and spirit pass quietly between generations.
Perhaps it is this finitude that makes life so difficult to define.
CREDITS
Photos: greatroam
CONTENT CREATIVE: EST8 MAG