For 52 weeks, from February 2010 to March 2011, Luo Hui and Madeleine Marie Slavick made a pairing of word and image. For the first 26, Madeleine photographed and Luo Hui wrote; for the second 26, the reverse. The pairing was published in ARTPOST as ‘Ghost Records’.

‘Ghost’ is past and present, present and absent. ‘Records’ is for the counting, the safekeeping, the touch and sound of the black LP. The words and images come from Hong Kong and New Zealand, and places in between.

Words come, and some, chosen. Words removed, yet fullness. The writing becomes no one’s, and the sense that we have never written before. The elements in an image relate, communicate, the said and unsaid. What is a photograph but a guardian.

‘Ghost Records’ was Luo Hui’s idea. He had just finished a piece of writing on Chinese ghostlore, 80,000 words long. Madeleine smiled as she copied paragraphs into her notebook, and the last sentence —

Fear is the beginning of human compassion.

When Madeleine was a newborn, her brother, a year or so older, suddenly died. And she, suddenly, and for years, has lived with absence, presence. The brother's gravemarker stands in the study, his birthday stays marked on the kitchen calendar. And for years after Luo Hui’s father died, his mother would place an extra pair of chopsticks every night on the dinner table.

There is a human being behind every ghost.

And friendship. Friends from several countries, from Facebook, poetry, cafes and the old dynasties. There is community.

Exhibition runs through July 10, 2010.

Opening Reception: this Saturday, June 18, 2011 (3-6 pm)