BONE OF BONES

Stanley Fung

Sep 15, 2018 ~ Nov 17

“The LORD God built the rib, which He had taken from the man, into a woman. Then He brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘this one, is bone of my bones…’”
－ Genesis

I believe that the beauty of bones is not just a fascination to me, but one that has amazed lots of people once in a time.

Around my four or five, I cleaned and dried several pork ribs after a meal, to make them toy blocks as the toy walnuts in those adults’ hands. In my fourth grade in the primary school, a human skull was unexpectedly unearthed when I, with my companions, were digging a hole to roast sweet potatoes. My friends got shocked, but just after a second, they started to play with the bones like footballs. I tried to stop them because I wanted to keep these bones for my own. Finally, they still decided to hand it over to the school, which much disappointed me. I grew up with collections of the bones of different animals such as birds, mice, chickens, dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, deer, horses and shells. And I even found the fossil scraps of the bones and teeth of a giant lizard and hadrosaur during my trip in Erlianhot, Inner Mongolia. In my eyes, the bone is one of the most beautiful things in the material world.

Bones are the main substantial components constituting vertebrates which help with body protection, movement, mineral storage and hematopoiesis function. The cells in the bones form up the lightest structure but it is strong enough to support the weight of the whole body. Rabbits escape from wolves. Leopards catch antelopes. Humans cultivate grains and build houses. Life is movement that depends on the bones. For many low-level life forms such as insects, mollusks, shells, shrimps and crabs, the exoskeleton becomes their shelter and enables them to run, leap and fly. However, only with the structure of endoskeleton can big animals like red-crowned cranes and condors spread the several-foot wings to make a gravity-defying flight in the air, and can heavy elephants make the earthshaking dash across the grand savannahs. Invisible, silent and reliable, the power of bones connects, supplies and supports every part of a body to complete those practical, romantic, strong and even gentle movements, which ensuring our basic life of feeding, walking, digging, carrying, operating tools and machines to our artistic and emotional life of dancing, exercising, playing, drawing, caring and hugging. Focusing on bones, I am deeply fascinated by the LORD God’s intelligence and compassion on life.

This exhibition is the beginning of my photography project which is named Bone of Bones. The thoughtful observation and random permutation of scattered bones used to be the LORD God’s sculpture and inspired many great masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore and Antonio Gaudi. Today, the visual composition will create a group of stereoscopic poems beyond any language, telling philosophic fables about divinity one after another.

Article: Stanley Fung