鏈 (Liàn)

– The Chainmail Tobacco Pouch 

Sounding identical to the word for love (戀), this piece binds the two concepts into a singular, some of us only know how to love the things that break us. And why do we deliberately puncture our own flesh? We endure the needle, the metal, the piercing, simply because we do not trust our own minds. Trauma fades into a dull, unreliable ache, and in our terror of forgetting what shaped us, we use pain to carve the record into our bodies.