At a dinner gathering one evening, when we introduced AFSAR to an official from a museum, they responded: “Collectives are too slow. I avoid working with collectives whenever possible.” At the time, we felt resistant to this comment, but now we realize their observation may have been right. Collective time is born out of delay. This delay is not merely an issue of coordination, but rather that each person carries their own different sense of time. Working together requires practice. If we don’t pause, slow down or bend our individual senses of time, meeting would be impossible. Ironically, for the four of us who came together to figure out a better way to live, we can’t help but keep returning to the topic of death. When one of us brings up death, the others stop what they are doing, lie down together, and listen softly.
This essay is a story crammed with the stubborn lingering attachments of friends who speak daily about having no reason to live—a story of the stained letters, contaminated handkerchiefs, broken voice memos, and faded photographs we exchange. Sooyoung Leam, editorial fellow at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, invited AFSAR member Eugene Hannah Park to join a discussion on ‘generating production’. And in turn, Park extended the invitation to the AFSAR members with whom she had been engaged in slow conversations, bringing them to this publication. If we take museums as monumental time capsules meant to be left standing after the end of the world, then we would like to take this opportunity to build an archive for the future together. This essay was written, read, and edited collectively by the four of us for another stranded time traveler who may someday discover these words. Yet there are far more than four voices you will hear through this text. One day, we will make a film together gathering the voices of women who, in the middle of the apocalypse, embark on the time traveling journey of reincarnation.
★ this framing of dying collectively as a love song for friends so many things feel so connected to our convo. (November 29, 2024, 2:39 a.m.)
✽ No major change has come, but won’t I die when it arrives? (June 5, 2025, 11:30 p.m..)
♢ Kim Hyesoon: “In poetry, there is no boundary between dying and living” (June 13, 2025, 6:50 a.m.)
※ I have to stay alive in order to welcome my third death, so I’ll try to remember (July 16, 2025, 6:15 a.m.)
☆ they made me tear up on the train while reading[;] dying as being reincarnated into your loved one feels so moving (July 16, 2025, 10:17 a.m.)[1]
In our longing for death, we discovered a secret. Death often imagined as an end without a future, where everything that came before it is cast into an eternal past, still holds the possibility of a future. Reincarnation, as its name implies, is the passage between lives—the process of crossing between birth and death. It suggests that consciousness, the spirit, and memory remain connected beyond the bounds of time, the body, and a singular context. It is a promise to meet again, freed from the constraints of time. When the boundary between you and me blurs—and I might have known you through countless different ways—would we hold each other with more care?
In much of the Chinese cultural sphere, influenced by Taoism and Buddhism, the seventh lunar month is known as “Ghost Month” or the “Hungry Ghost Festival (中元節),” when traditional customs to honor the dead are observed. The photo shows the burning of spirit money (jizhi, 紙錢). Photo: AFSAR, Shantou, China, 2025.
Across Asia, narratives of reincarnation have resurfaced in diverse forms throughout time. One such instance is the work of Lee Jin-kyung whose ideas of death and rebirth we consider to be linked to love. Referencing on Jorge Luis Borges’s The Immortal, Lee connects immortality to the concept of reincarnation, suggesting that if reincarnation is real, then we may already be living immortal lives.[2] Death may occur in between each instance of life, but if you take away its erasure of our memories, our lives form a continuous span of immortal existence. From this perspective, the suffering of the present can be understood as unfinished business from a previous life—that is, karma—giving our pain a name and meaning, freeing us from its burden. At the same time, the impossibility of dying can become its own form of torment. A life that repeats without retaining its previous life’s memories is nothing but a continuation of unexplained anguish. Death never ends, and pain persists without reason or context.
The possibility of love begins here. Without memory, “I” cannot exist; in other words, without memory, “I” dissolves. If so, can’t “I” be everything all at once—a state prior to a fixed form, a state when all possibilities of being remain open? This latent self, this frame of mind, shifting “I” from the singular to encompassing the world itself, moves karma beyond a calculus of gains and losses. It opens a radical shift in imagination—from a self-interested view of karma where one treats one’s enemies with kindness out of concern for future consequences, to one, where “your” suffering becomes indistinguishable from “mine” because now our memories are no longer separated.
Photograph taken during AFSAR’s research trip. Hungry Ghost Festival event. Photo: AFSAR, Hong Kong, 2025.
With this line of thinking, the phrase “love thy neighbor” comes to mind. Though originally from the Bible, it has been taken up by thinkers across history as a way to reflect on the ethics of community. Doesn’t loving one’s neighbor, in fact, mean to love the distant other? Loving those who are close to us and extensions of ourselves is relatively easy. But to love someone far removed from ourselves—someone with whom we share no reciprocal relationship, from whom we expect nothing in return—that is where the radical force of relationality emerges, when reincarnation expands love for the self into love for the world. My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving.[3]
Through AFSAR, we tried to learn how to love the distant other—by reading, writing poetry, organizing workshops, and making films and the like together. In particular while making AFSAR×DAVRA’s Proxy Conference: In Forest (2023) and Mooni Perry’s Missing (2024), we went through an intensive process of collective scriptwriting, performance, and filming and creation. These experiences revealed the possibilities of how we could practice gathering and spending time together. From here, new questions arose: If reincarnation is a method for reimagining our relation to the world, could collective creation become a way of returning to the future or advancing into the past?
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Phantoms of Nabua (2009), which is part of his project Primitive (2009–10), provides one answer.[4] Amid the ruins of Nabua, a village on the Lao-Thai border along the Mekong River, Weerasethakul uncovered countless stories of the dead. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the Thai military occupied the region under the pretext of eradicating communist insurgents. Villagers were forced to live under constant surveillance, subjected to killings, torture, and sexual violence.
In Nabua, where the specter of anticommunism is intertwined with the legend of a “widow ghost” who abducts men, Weerasethakul links the notion of the primitive to reincarnation and transformation. Because here, the primitive becomes the memory of distant others whose origins cannot be traced. Weerasethakul sees in the teenage boys of Nabua, “a portrait of the teenage male descendants of the farmer communists, freed from the widow ghost’s empire,” friends executed by firing squad, reincarnations of villagers who fled into the jungle, and “manifestation[s] of someone who has created various fictional scenarios in order to implant memory into place.” Together with them, he builds a spaceship.[5] The future Weerasethakul speaks of is one where time accumulates like dust, carrying with it a musty scent. Asian science fiction and its visions of the future are not filled with gleaming neon cities or post-humans clad in body suits made of the latest cutting-edge material. Rather, it is made up of people who are reborn again and again, and the stories that reach out towards distant others.
Female gathering and chanting. Photo: AFSAR, Baode Shantang (報德善堂), Heping Town (和平鎭), Shantou, China, 2025.
The Seven Fairies are mythical daughters of the Jade Emperor, symbolizing women’s craft and skill. One of the craft items made in preparation for the Seven Fairies Festival. Photo: AFSAR, Zhu Village (珠村), Guangzhou, China, 2025.
The future does not belong to individuals. It is a world of reincarnation, of rhizomes—not time that is coming, but returning again. Memory and community shape and reshape one another, continually turning the future backward. People form communities by indirectly sharing memories, and at the same time these collective sensibilities reconfigure memory. In this process, the future transforms as it returns.
For instance, in southern China’s Guangdong and Fujian provinces, there are many stories of women who left their homelands and became deities.[6] Having escaped the harsh oppression and violence they faced as women, they were branded as witches in their lifetimes. Skilled in martial arts and as wanderers without a home, they often served as village shamans before becoming “gods.” Women who chose independence over marriage— such as the Comb Sisters[7] and the Cai Gu[8], who built communities of their own—naturally came to worship these female deities. Those who were swept up by this “female-god fever” shared a sense of collectivity, while their goddess “fandom” culture reconfigured the memory and the community of people living in the present. In this way, community becomes a continuously transforming future memory of women who’ve lost their homelands, women deities, and distant others.
AFSAR members visiting the Sin Tsz Miu (仙姊廟, Cantonese: Sin Ze Miu, English: Seven Sisters Temple) on Peng Chau Island, dedicated to the Seven Fairies. Photo: AFSAR, Hong Kong, 2025.
We often ask ourselves: If we were to create a science-fiction film together, who would appear in it? Who would be reborn amid the apocalypse and travel through time? Who would already have this sensibility? MuMu, a Taiwanese scholar and friend of AFSAR, notes that a homeless ghost—an ailing person stigmatized by the village—became a female deity. For members of AFSAR—who have wandered far from home, whether literally or symbolically, and have experienced pain in their own time and place—the figures of the “sick–ghost–old woman” are not outsiders. They are the world itself whom we are bound through community. Our protagonists are ever shifting, taking shape as incarnations of revenge and time travelers.
Those who are sick know a secret. While the powerful enjoy the privilege of ignorance, the oppressed and the sick, driven by the need to survive, examine the structures of the world more closely than anyone—and come to know its true nature. Bodies that deviate from the temporal order indoctrinated by the Industrial Revolution gain a vision to see its ulterior motives and what it controls. Therefore, the secret the sick know best concerns time.
As we begin to fall ill, and became “those who know time,” a few friends disclosed another secret to us—that the sick are time travelers, moving through “crip time.”[9] The destination of this journey is neither a physical place nor a synchronized time. Rather, where we arrive at is a profound sense of solidarity, grounded in the truth of embodied knowledge. This solidarity resonates with what feminist scholar Shayda Kafai terms “crip-centric liberated zones”: spaces created through the practice of multidirectional communal love. These spaces, through the shared act of love toward disability, creates solidarity across divergent temporalities—and in doing so, collectively frees our bodies and minds from the oppression of normativity.[10]
The impetus behind this liberation lies in the memory or recognition of past lives. For example, through AFSAR, we envision the possibility of sharing time, or even of a temporal quantum leap. The more we spend time with AFSAR, the more it feels like our time is multiplied, growing in volume and depth rather than just being used, wasted, or spent. Because we have this strong belief that someone in AFSAR will absorb what we share across time, space, generations, and they will somehow return to me through our connections that are AFSAR.
Linear temporality of the present must be really unsettled by the crip time of the sick because the sick can travel into the future. They carry an instinctive knowledge of what awaits us all: disability and the consequences of relentless exploitation and development. The sick, especially those who reach outward, do not stop at knowing; they extend the imaginative capability of crip time toward transformation and reincarnation, actively shaping the future. They teach us to see delays, asynchrony and breaks as unexpected surplus time we didn’t know we had, and to spare that for the “you” that will be “me” and for the “me” that will be “you” in the future.
As someone with a history of immigration in the family, a second generation, I often feel rootless, disconnected to deep bonds of “homeland” and lineage. When I look through archives (government records, family albums, newspapers), I find myself searching for what I’ve lost without really knowing what is lost, people I never got to know, places I’ve never been. In those moments, I feel adrift, like a ghost who has long forgotten their cause of death. In the motherland I know only through the memories of others, I discover countless gaps. Though these gaps make me lose the ability to be whole, they give rise to new collisions that shape a multiverse. As I gaze at the sky and find more words to describe it, as I discover independence movements unfolding in faraway places at the same time, as I hear countless sorrowful songs that stir the same emotions, my sense of time expands. Thus, rather than finding myself in the absence of archives, I become a ghost called “us.”
Ghosts exist in countless places at once, inhabit countless moments in time. Ghosts are time travelers. Free from time’s tethers, they persist, attached to land, people, trauma, relationships, emotions. As long as these attachments remain, so do they. When such attachments or memories shift and disappear, the ghosts must move too or else risk fading into obscurity. For this reason, ghosts carry the burden of being missing, while still existing and accumulating knowledge. When one root is torn out, another needs to bore down deeper; when a bond is severed, its fragments need to be tied together. In this way, ghosts transform while still holding parts of themselves. Within each spirit are memories buried in the earth, the unfulfilled wishes of the departed, the intuition they accumulated through life, and the tangled strands of history, language, culture, and voices. No matter how hard one tries, ghosts cannot be reduced to singular entities. I too am a ghost, one who, unable to remain in one place, crosses dimensions and amidst the conflict of figuring out who I am, reaches outward in search of a place to land, to listen to echoes, becoming more than one me.
The term “crone” often carries pejorative connotations in its usage in everyday speech and folklore. At the same time, it is synonymous with wisdom, magical power, and the closing arc of life’s cycle. In the narrative of reincarnation, older women are powerful holders of essential knowledge that those in the earlier cycles of life desperately need to survive. While traveling in Taiwan and reflecting on how to define East Asian science fiction, Mooni Perry was told by philosopher Choi Yumi that old women should play a central role.[11] Choi referred to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), which cites a Vietnamese proverb: “A young woman is a maiden; a married woman is a servant; an old woman is an old monkey.” Yet the derisive tone paradoxically affirms the power of old women. What those in power scorn as the cunning nature of the monkey is, actually the strength of women who have endured the passage from maiden to servant, and the wisdom that has enabled the vulnerable to survive.
The crone is our ancestor—our past and future life. She prays for the well-being of family and homeland, carrying in her body knowledge preserved as song, memory, and sustenance. The Samsin Halmi, who assigns each child their fate and governs pregnancy and birth, and the Mago Halmi, who can create islands inside her skirt and mountains from her urine, whisper prophecies in our ears, shield us from danger, and guide our destinies toward their brightest possibilities. I once heard that Korea’s shamanism, or mugyo, had endured colonial rule, dictatorship, and modernization thanks to the faith of old women. Their deep belief transformed them into spirits who guide and protect the shamans. Perhaps they already dwell within us as intuition, reincarnated as our instinct. And soon, we, too, will become them.
We are becoming extinct because we don’t have love, we love because extinction doesn’t exist, because we are becoming extinct we reproduce and evolve, because we love we gain and lose language.[12]
Artist Saodat Ismailova, sociologist Rolando Vazquez, and researcher Sophie Krier, in their coauthored essay “Healing as Re-Membering,” ask how we remember who we are.[13] Ismailova proposes “re-membering”—a term that can mean both “to remember again” and “to piece back together”—as a responsibility in situations where one is fractured from family, land, community, ancestors, memory, and dreams. It becomes our task to carry knowledge across time, opening the door to the future, one in which we exist, our ancestors persist, and we generate alternative cosmologies.
Like a plant cut from its stem and replanted in another pot, growing into a separate, independent life, everything in the world is both “me” and not me: a love free from gain or loss; the ache I feel when I see a figure with darkened legs sitting before the temple and recognize myself; because they are me and not me, I do not feel pity, but respect. For some, their karma is so profound and complex that they are reincarnated into many fragmented spirits—fragments of fragments. That’s why we love those who are sick. In secret, we hold genuine affection and cheer on those who are bloody. We love those who stammer through words. We love those who are twisted beyond recognition. We love those suffering from an inferiority complex, those consumed by jealousy, those impoverished at heart, those who fall over themselves to be loved, those who people avoid for feeling too much, those who always complain, those who can’t make up their minds, those who fail to keep even the smallest promise, those unable to break free from addiction, those pained by shame, those who fail again and again. We truly love them.
When the apocalypse comes, they will be the ones to scoff. Because the end is something that has always been here.
AFSAR (Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research) addresses the urgent need for transnational discourse through reciprocal exchange between Asian and diasporic practitioners, generating an embodied archive from collective artistic research. Through filmmaking, study groups, and other activities, AFSAR takes “Asia” as a framework to explore issues affecting its localities and diaspora. AFSAR has recently participated in How to Hold Your Breath (Asia Art Biennial, 2024); the event Network for Empowerment, Solidarity, and Transregionality, with AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions) (Palais de Tokyo, 2024); and the exhibition Green Snake: Women-Centered Ecologies (Tai Kwun, 2023–24). To this publication project, Christina Yuna Ko, Eugene Hannah Park, Mooni Perry, and Sun Park participated.
[1] The four members were in a group chat titled “AFSAR Dreaming for Funds.” These messages are excerpted from this chat.
[2] Lee Jin-kyung, “Why the Impossibility of Death Becomes Suffering—Reincarnation: Eternal Recurrence and Nihilism,” Philosophizing Buddhism [in Korean] (Seoul: Hue, 2016), 201–218.
[3] Andrea Gibson, “Love Letter from the Afterlife,” Things That Don’t Suck, December 21, 2023.
[4] Primitive is a project by Apichatpong Weerasethakul consisting of a book, photographs, and videos filmed in his hometown of Isan in northeastern Thailand. The project comprises the seven-channel video installation Primitive, the single-channel video Phantoms of Nabua, and the short film Letter to Uncle Boonmee. The feature-length film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) concludes the project.
[5] Apichatpong Weerasethakul, “Memories of Nabua: A Note on the Primitive Project,” in Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers: Confronting Modernity Against Modernity [in Korean] (Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art; Hyunsil Books, 2014), 55–69.
[6] The deities referred to here are neither primordial beings who created the universe nor mythological figures born of cosmologies nor celestial entities beyond human reach. They are not symbols or fictional characters but historical figures whose births are clearly documented and who once truly existed.
[7] The Comb Sisters was a women’s community that emerged in Shunde, Guangdong, during the late Ming dynasty. Rejecting marriage and declaring independence, they supported themselves by working in the silk industry. With the decline of the silk trade and shifting social conditions in the early twentieth century, their numbers gradually diminished, and many migrated for work, engaging in domestic labor not only in Hong Kong but also in Southeast Asia, including in Singapore. For more information, see Yingjia Tan, “Comb Sisters,” Places Journal (November 2024), https://doi.org/10.22269/241116/.
[8] The Cai Gu was a celibate, vegetarian, women’s Buddhist community originating in the Minnan region of Fujian. They practiced and disseminated Buddhism through the operation of temples, schools, and vegetarian restaurants. In the early twentieth century, members migrated to Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Taiwan, where they established temples and engaged in charitable activities. For more information, see Ying Ruo, “Virtuous Women on the Move: Minnan Vegetarian Women (Caigu) and Chinese Buddhism in Twentieth-Century Singapore,” Studies in Chinese Religions 17 (2021): 125–181.
[9] The first friends to share this secret with us were the Carefuffle Working Group. Led by disabled and queer members, Carefuffle is a collective that engages with issues of care, interdependence, creative agency, and social justice. Through their artistic practice, they challenge the framing of disability as deficiency, affirming instead its wholeness. They regard accessibility as both a shared joy and a collective responsibility for liberation, sustaining practices that work to dismantle ableism and cultural exclusion.
[10] Shayda Kafai, “Creating Crip-Centric Liberated Zones,” Crip Kinship: The Disability Justice & Art Activism of Sins Invalid (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021).
[11] Choi Yumi, email message to Mooni Perry, April 27, 2023.
[12] Yoo Seon-hye, “Read Love and Extinction in Reverse,” Read Love and Extinction in Reverse [in Korean] (Seoul: Munji Publishing, 2024), 48.
[13] Saodat Ismailova, Rolando Vázquez, and Sophie Krier, “Healing as Re-Membering: Second Conversation between Saodat Ismailova and Rolando Vázquez, 2020,” in Meanderings in Worlds of Mourning, ed. Sophie Krier, Saodat Ismailova, and Rolando Vázquez, Field Essays 5 (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2022), 38–63.
Fellow Sooyoung Leam
