TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Walking on Cures/Curses: How the Ritual of Herb Scattering, Breathing, and Memorizing Mediate Collective Trauma and Public Healing

In my art piece Herbary: Co-respiration, I explore the act of scattering herb remnants (药渣) in public spaces as a ritual rooted local knowledge, traditional healing practices, and folklore in ancient china. This practice transforms herb remnants into powerful symbols, oscillating between healing and curse, and embodying the complex interplay between herbal potency, human vulnerability, supernatural energies and communal interaction.
Scattering herb remnants held dual purposes: as blessings to share a remedy’s effectiveness with the community, and as a curse to transfer misfortune or unhealed illness away, sometimes casting doubt on a failed treatment. Thus, these remnants act as agents of healing and caution, bridging the individual suffering with family careness. Herb remnants, when discarded in communal spaces, serve as a powerful medium for collective memory and shared healing, representing not only the illness treated but also a hope for recovery. This ritualized scattering functions as a form of “counter-forgetting,” a public acknowledgment of communal traumas, from individual illnesses to societal wounds. Historically, such practices enabled communities to externalize and potentially nullify suffering by involving the public in a shared, visible act of remediation. Herb remnants, in this way, become active agents in social healing—connecting individual ailments to the wider social fabric and (super)natural world.
In today’s and any post-pandemic era, revisiting these practices offers insights into how public rituals and shared memories can foster resilience against the isolating effects of modern healthcare paradigms. Through such ritualized acts, my work aims to reinvigorate traditional pathways of collective healing and resilience, suggesting a “prescription” for reconnecting people, plants, and shared spaces in a time of cultural and social fragmentation.