This project is made possible with support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the American Craft Council, and the MacDowell Colony.

At the center of Mary Ting's installation is a sewn, fragmented, burnt papershroud a decaying vestige of a previous life and time. Dangling from the shroud and swarming in a densely entangled pile below are soot-covered, poisonous creatures (centipede, scorpion, toad, snake, and spider). In Shanxi and Shaanxi Provinces of Northern China, these creatures, known as The Five Poisons, are depicted in folk objects to ward off evil and sickness. But even as they evoke dying folkways, these creatures arouse very contemporary, living fears.