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Cang Jie’s Drought
A performance telling the story of a legendary communicator.
In this piece I sought to pay respect to and evoke the closely observational spirit of Cang Jie, who is said to have invented Chinese oracle bone script, one of the earliest known forms of written Chinese. 

Cang Jie had a broad face and four eyes, and an incredible capacity to recall details of events. Before writing, Cang Jie and Ju Song used rope knotting and pottery carving to preserve historical memory in the reign of the Yellow Emperor. One day, the Yellow Emperor summoned Cang Jie to discuss an incident. To his surprise, the rope carrying this memory was rotten, and the pottery was difficult to interpret because it had been Ju Song, and not him, who had carved it. The Yellow Emperor demanded a new recording method, and set Cang Jie and Ju Song to the task.

Cang Jie thought about the task for days. He began to notice the footprints of various animals in the snow - a deer, a bear, a pheasant - and came up with the idea of sketching the likenesses of those animals as a way to communicate his encounters with them. He realized this method was too complicated, and recalled the trigrams and hexagrams of the Ba Gua and Yi Jing (I Ching) which could relay complex concepts through simple graphic means. He used a stick and sketched numerous patterns into the snow. He drew patterns all through the night.

Cang Jie and Ju Song presented their communication system to the Yellow Emperor. Pleased, he exclaimed: “Only the language of humans can explain the heart of heaven and Earth!”

The crowd erupted in applause and golden millet rained from the sky. The demons shuddered with fear for what humans had gained the ability to do. 

Presented in Vancouver at KW Studios on May 11, 2024, and in Seattle at Recreational Psychoacoustics Lab on May 27, 2024.

Music composed by and performed by enereph and deadquiet (Victory Nguyen).
Photos by Nima Naimi