Vera Buck
Sei Shi‘s Chopsticks or: How to Eat a Lion
2014 / wooden chopsticks / ink on paper
The project Shi Shi‘s Chopsticks or: How to Eat a Lion is a parodistic quote on Kafka‘s Gabel (Kafka‘s fork) as exposed in the Deutsche Literaturarchiv in Marbach. It bears reference to Yuen Ren Chao‘s poem The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den. Allegedly displaying the poet‘s chopsticks, found in a stone den in China and brought to a market in Hong Kong, the work arises the question of how Chao‘s central charakter Shi Shi possibly ate the ten lions – a question that is actually less of an issue and no more serious than the poem itself. With The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, Yuen Ren Chao wrote a homophonic piece of text, that “if reproduced phonetically with English letters” can only be uttered by the constant repetition of the syllable “shi”.
