Rachel Hsu presents The Weight of Our Living

A stone’s throw

The work consists of a six-foot circle of river stones embedded in a concrete base. The public is invited to walk barefoot over the stones, much as one would traverse a labyrinth. A small, curved bench nearby allows for viewing the installation and reflecting on the experience of walking it.

Hsu drew inspiration from installations she’d seen in Taiwan, where they’re often placed in parks and used for reflexology therapy, an element of traditional Chinese medicine. “They’re often more narrow and linear, like a pathway,” she explained. “And they’re often designed in different levels in the challenges to your feet, like beginner, intermediate, and expert. You’d see these older people who’ve had this in their practice for a long time, walking over the most challenging versions with ease.”

Visually, she softened the array of stones with plantings. Microclover, blue star creeper, and moss frame the circumference and spread through thin channels across the circular structure. “I wanted to inject small breaths of miracles with the plants,” she noted. “Moments of life creeping through the sturdy, heavy stone.” The plantings are a bit thicker along the edge of one section, encroaching slightly over the stones, giving it an aura of age, as if the work has been here for a long time and the earth is slowly overtaking it.

Home away from home away from home

A Seattle native, Hsu came to Philadelphia to earn an MFA at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture and has since made our city her home. She’s an interdisciplinary artist who works with visual art, poetry, and language, and especially the ambiguity the latter can create. “I’m interested in language but also those times when language fails,” she explained.

It’s informed by her childhood as the daughter of a Taiwanese immigrant, witnessing her mother’s feeling of distance and displacement, through both physical separation and linguistic differences. Hsu encountered the latter as an American learning Mandarin, and then also experienced a similar physical dislocation when she moved across the country.

This is her first public artwork. “I’ve created a couple of iterations on this theme,” she said. “A dream was to have it as an outdoor piece.”

You can find The Weight of Our Living in Maja Park, a long strip of green space running along the southernmost lane of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, between North 22nd and 24th Streets and adjacent to the Park Towne Place apartment complex. The park’s eastern end features its namesake sculpture, Maja, by Gerhard Marcks. The German sculptor was an instructor at the famed art school Bauhaus in the 1920s, but was later ostracized by the Nazis as creating “degenerate art.” The aPA acquired Maja in 1949 and for over 40 years it graced the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. After being in storage for a couple of decades, it was installed in its current location when the park was dedicated in 2021.

The weight we hold

In planning her proposal, Hsu visited the site several times, and at different parts of the day. She was attracted to an allée of graceful trees that are closer to the other end of the park from the statue. “I thought I’d use the allée of curved boughs reaching over the work, in a sort of embrace,” she said. “I’m attracted to dappled light, and if you come right before sunset, the trees cast shadows over the stones.”

The title of the piece, The Weight of Our Living, is borrowed from an essay by the Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong. “For me, it describes the feeling of carrying people with me because of their influence,” Hsu reflected. “After the Atlanta Asian spa shootings in 2021, I felt like I was carrying a weight of grief around. I was trying to question the grief that we carry around. Where does that weight live in you?”

The installation will be in place through October, so Hsu is looking forward to a sense of seasonal changes that will take place. “To have that joy of growth in the summer, and then the incoming feeling of sorrow and loss in the fall.”

When asked if the work is site-specific, she responded, “I think of it as site-responsive. I'd love for it to find a home elsewhere, but it would need to be informed by that space, just as it has been here.”