No Shirt No Service #2 - Michelle Chang Qin
May 17th, 2025
Exhibition Series
Lucky Sushi & Wok - Lisbon, Portugal
Bond Presents… No Shirt No Service #2
Michelle Chang Qin
17 May 2025, 8:00pm
Lucky Sushi & Wok
R. Lucinda do Carmo 23A, 1900-302 Lisboa
As the rumor goes, the memory of a goldfish only lasts three seconds. In the time it takes to map its bowl’s perimeter, Goldfish sees the world anew, full of potential. Its life is defined by cyclical renewals—the world a sphere of chance.
Perhaps it is Goldfish who is the model practitioner of the I-Ching, translated into English as “The Book of Changes.” To make a choice is to make a change. Decisions, decisions… Those of us with decisions to weigh have our tools for divination: dice rolling, coin flipping, tarot pulling, astrology reading. Michelle has three shells.
Seeking directions, Michelle drops her shells on Lisbon’s limestone calçada and takes a photograph. Limestone—a composite of shells compressed under the weight of seawater—encounters its progeny in a moment of impact. Michelle reads the resulting message in the shells’ orientation: yin, yang, yang, a trigram. This arrangement corresponds to one of the eight cardinal points on the circle of the I-Ching, indicating a path to follow, a vector to meander. The shells drop, gesturing southwest, and Michelle moves to the next corner. Allowing chance to make change, she finds herself at the laundromat.
Change is exchanged to make clothes spin in a circle, finding themselves anew in orientation, fresh in the cycle from dirty to clean. The final divination yields the hexagram, ䷽ (62), calling attention to the significance of the small. Goldfish mouths, small things may be done, great things may not. Decisions, decisions… every choice a change, every action a minor transgression.
Special thanks to Liska Henglein for the photographs.
Organized in collaboration with Joseph Issac Cohen