Zen Bestiary

2024

The Zen Bestiary is the index, not the myth. The same recurring creature is photographed once in each material the world has on offer — glass, plastic, fur, wool, jelly, rubber — as if the figure were a hypothesis being tested against the periodic table.

Read end to end, the bestiary is a quiet argument about identity: that the form stays, that the surface decides everything else, and that none of the eras would exist if material did not first agree to perform.

The creature pressed in warm amber plastic — the kind that imitates honey without committing to it. Light enters the surface for a few millimetres and then changes its mind. The form holds, but the warmth is borrowed; up close you can almost hear the material deciding whether to age or to remain stubbornly new.

amethyst jelly — Set in a jelly the colour of old amethyst. The body trembles whenever the room shifts and, if you wait long enough, resettles into the same shape, slightly less convinced of itself than before. A specimen for patient viewing, ideally from a chair, with the lights dimmed enough to take the colour seriously.

azure glass — Cast in glass kept just shy of breaking blue. The colour is dense at the edges and thin at the centre, so that the creature reads as something glimpsed under cold water rather than directly on a shelf. A small tap on the surface with a fingernail would not be appreciated by the bestiary's curators.

blue glass — Blue glass, lit from somewhere behind the figure. In this entry the creature serves more as lens than as subject — what you read is the light that has passed through it, slightly tinted, slightly slowed, with all of the figure's interior gathered into the transmission instead of the silhouette.

blue jelly — Jelly the colour of a calm afternoon pool. The creature inside wears the colour like a slow swimsuit, and the rest of the bestiary respectfully gives it space. Touch is not advised: the surface is friendlier than the centre, which has not entirely forgotten that it could, in theory, leave on its own.

Plastic with the matte of a cheap toy. The creature has been demoted to childhood and seems unbothered by the demotion. The surface scratches easily; the form, somehow, survives the scratching, the way certain figures survive being mass-produced by retaining their original posture under all conditions.