zhixin sheng

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the sensualists: a book of prayer
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The sensualists: a book of prayer






 book covers






details of the physical copy

















selected digital scans




selected digital collages 



The Sensualists: A Book of Prayer is a hybrid work of lyric essays and visual collages, a response to my experience of unclaimed and delayed grief. Seven years after my grandfather’s death, I realized I had been haunted by such loss, and the loss was itself lost in time. Through formal experimentation and approaching the subject matter from various perspectives, I began to reckon with the hollowed-out loss while learning how to consciously reconcile a traumatic event.

Structured as a non-linear collection of essays and images, the work incorporates fragmentation and overlaying as key features of form that reflect the texture of memory: uncertain, sensory, recursive. The visual elements—collages and scans—are dialogic to the writing. They echo, shift, and interrupt, working sometimes in parallel with the text, but also undermining the lucidity of words with the indeterminacy of the images.

At its heart, The Sensualists resists both closure and coherence. It doesn’t seek to reconstruct a clear narrative or monumentalize the past. Instead, it dwells in small, embodied details: gestures, routines, sensory impressions that resonate in the present, in the cityscape and bodily awareness that lingers. In conversation with the memoir genre, this project asks how memory and loss can be translated not just through recounting, but also in the logic of rhythm, juxtaposition, the interplay and gap between images and texts.





view the full project here (some important details are only visible in the physical copy, including the use of transparencies and overlaying that are not captured in the digital version.)