Alan Chen

Black ink is carbon. Black is both additional and subtractive. It's an opaque coal or a translucent diamond. The foreground or the background. We owe it our lives and our deaths. Cancer and cures. This darkness occupies soil but the same in lightness of air. It is an element that enables all known life, yet remains as all organic matter decays. The same indefinite blackness of death is what we break down to. It is in the energy we consume, yet the waste we exhale.

Black ink is the product of soot and ash. Of fire. This is the chaos, the violence. Tragedy. The beginning/end of much beauty. We use it to juxtapose/judge, contrast/compare.

Hell has been characterized by an eternity beneath in its flames. These are the very same flames which embody the sun, which lights the sky, providing nutrient and heat.

This is our God. It is kind but merciless. Part penance, part savior. It is my sudden existence and my inexplicable absence. Evidence of pain and resolution. For this, I am its prisoner and disciple. I will bear it, but I will distribute it.