Ecology of Invocation: Olfactory Rituals and Cross-Border Memory
A Research Reflection from the GMS Artist Residency
Haonan HE
GMS Residency, OCAC (Office of Contemporary Art and Culture), Bangkok, 2025
I. Encounters and Ritual Fragments
Guided by questions of plant knowledge, olfaction, repair, and intra-regional decolonial ecologies, my research during the residency focused on sacred and psychoactive scent practices in Loei province and the broader Mekong context. I began with a field visit to a Tai Dam village in Chiang Khan, northeastern Thailand, where I encountered Chao Mae Nang Tiam, a female spiritual leader who shared with me the oral tradition of welcoming female deities through perfumes traditionally crafted by themselves from local plant materials—a practice that today has largely shifted toward the use of pre-made perfumes. Her description of the ritual revealed how such practices are rapidly disappearing, replaced by more standardized forms of spiritual expression.
This led me to investigate Nam Ob Thai—the very kind of perfume Chao Mae Nang Tiam referred to—a traditional Thai perfumed water still commonly used in religious contexts. While it draws from modern perfumery aesthetics—borrowing from bottle design and scent typologies—its primary function remains tied to Buddhist rituals and offerings. At the same time, it exists in subtle tension with Western fragrance industries, which increasingly shape the olfactory landscape of urban Thailand.
Through comparative analysis and ingredient tracing, I identified five key aromatic plants that bridge divine and folk practices across the region: Cananga odorata (ylang-ylang), Piper ribesioides(spicy forest vine), Santalum album (sandalwood), Boswellia spp. (frankincense resin), and Borneol (natural camphor). These plants became central to my research and installation, not just as materials but as carriers of histories, migrations, and displaced sacredness.
At the same time, I sought to expand the framework by including neuroactive species with deep ritual roots, particularly Papaver somniferum (opium poppy). This direction also stemmed from my prior work on the cultural and political history of the opium poppy. Their inclusion underscored the porous boundary between the divine and the profane, the sacred and the illicit, particularly in regions like the Golden Triangle.
II. Indra's Net and the Poetics of Dispersion
The research culminated in the creation of a site-specific multisensory installation titled Fugitive Scent Logics (Indra’s Net). The work was installed as a suspended polygonal rope net, approximately 6.3 meters in length and 3.7 meters in width, hanging at a height of 1.5 to 2.5 meters above the ground. From this web-like structure, over 120 small sculptural candles were suspended, each corresponding to a specific plant and scent used in my research.
Each candle was uniquely crafted—first shaped by hand in clay and then cast using silicone molds—with its form echoing the qualities or histories of the plant it represented. I used both essential oils and scent extracts derived from fresh and dried botanical matter, some prepared on-site during the residency. The use of wax allowed for precise coloration and form retention, while the slow-release scent design ensured that each component contributed to the overall olfactory field of the work.
Accompanying the installation was an interpretive card, designed to provide viewers with contextual information. One side featured a color-coded map indicating the origin of each plant, while the other offered brief descriptions of the scents, their cultural significance, and migration histories within the region.
Visually and conceptually, the net was inspired by the Mahayana Buddhist and Hindu metaphor of Indra’s Net—a cosmic structure of interconnected nodes reflecting one another. While often understood as a symbol of universal order or metaphysical interdependence, Indra’s Net also gestures toward the absence of a fixed center and the irreducible multiplicity of all things.[1] In this installation, scent becomes the element that destabilizes the geometry—it slips through the knots and gaps of the net, drifting and diffusing unpredictably. It is through art, I believe, that such release becomes possible: art as a gesture that both inhabits and disrupts the grid, allowing memory and sensation to pulse beyond structure while still held within its trace.
Drawing from Buddhist cosmology and ritual theory—particularly the concept of sacred space as a threshold rather than a container—I began to see the net not just as a structure, but as a liminal zone that leaks meaning, memory, and relation across boundaries.[2] What drips through are traces—olfactory echoes of unrecorded rituals, scattered cosmologies, and transborder migrations. Rather than sealing meaning, the installation opens it.
Here, scent became a mode of reflection and relation: a suspended invocation of fragmented ritual practices, botanical memory, and suppressed ecologies. The installation invited viewers to enter and move slowly through this mesh of ephemeral traces, activating not only their vision but their breath, memory, and presence.
III. From Field to Framework: Toward a Methodology of Invocation
The GMS residency did not mark an end but a beginning. Due to the condensed timeframe, it was difficult to pursue deeper or cross-regional investigations during the residency itself. In the time between returning to and departing from Bangkok, I deepened my inquiry into Buddhist scent culture by visiting shops specializing in Nam Ob Thai production and exploring the religious goods markets on Rattanakosin Island. Through conversations with artisans, sellers, and observations of the vibrant trade in scented oils, incense, fresh flower garlands, and ceremonial perfumes, I gained insight into how smell remains deeply embedded in ritual life. These spaces revealed an enduring relationship between scent and sanctity—one that transcends abstract doctrine and continues to shape material and spiritual practices today. They also pointed to what might be called a sensory economy of belief, where scent circulates not only as a material for devotion, but as a form of affective and symbolic currency within the broader ecology of faith.
This post-residency exploration has sparked a new chapter in my research, which I plan to continue through further fieldwork and artistic experimentation. I am particularly interested in how scent functions as a bridge between cosmology and embodiment, how it may serve as a decolonial tool for accessing erased or disfigured traditions of perception, and how it participates in devotional and economic circuits where belief, materiality, and value coalesce.
As I began to reflect on the ways scent is embedded in Buddhist devotional economies and transregional rituals, I turned to broader philosophical interpretations of ritual space—especially within Buddhist cosmology and critical spatial theory—which frame sacred space as not a container but a threshold that leaks across architectural and political structures. Similarly, the insights of Malaysian scholar Farish Noor on memory in Southeast Asia—as layered, contested, and spiritual—have been helpful in reimagining how sensorial practice can index haunted colonial residues across borders. These ideas resonate with the curatorial ethos of Gridthiya Gaweewong, who continues to advocate for translocal cultural imaginaries rooted in vernacular belief and resistance.
Inspired by these perspectives, I have started to conceptualize my process as a form of ritual cartography: the mapping of history through embodied and affective traces. This includes what might be called intra-regional hauntologies—attending to the lingering presences of suppressed ecologies and spiritual epistemologies across Southeast Asia. In dialogue with these thinkers and with the Andean notion of yanak uywaña proposed by Elvira Espejo Ayca, I am shaping a methodology I refer to as an ecology of invocation. This framework emphasizes mutual nourishment, relational sensing, and the cultivation of artworks not as objects, but as spirit-bearing interfaces—entangled, sensate, and generative across time and space.
IV. Closing Currents: Perception, Relation, and the South-South Sensorium
Participating in the GMS Artist Residency has profoundly deepened my understanding of what it means to connect across borders—not only geographic and political, but epistemic and sensorial. In the Mekong region, where I was born and where the residues of colonial control, Cold War militarization, and development ideology continue to shape life, the urgency of rethinking how we relate across differences cannot be overstated.
The GMS residency was more than a temporary site for creation—it served as a space of relational rehearsal, a speculative field for reimagining how historically fragmented regions might convene beyond state-centered narratives. Rather than viewing the GMS as a marginal periphery waiting for definition, I began to sense it as an active and plural terrain—charged with political, ecological, and cultural potential. This shift in perspective was informed by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s concept of "difference without separability," which insists on entangled coexistence without recourse to universal categories. Her thinking provided a crucial lens through which I could articulate why a South-to-South imaginary must begin with shared opacity rather than transparent sameness. In the face of dominant developmental or extractive logics, it is this insistence on relation—untidy, layered, sensory—that offers a path toward renewed regional ethics.
Art, in this context, becomes a technology of relation. It does not simply express ideas; it operationalizes alternative modes of knowing and being that are often rendered illegible by dominant epistemologies. The residency’s constellation of artists—from Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and China—did more than share a space; we formed a fleeting sensorium of co-presence. Through shared meals, slow dialogue, and collaborative gestures, we collectively rehearsed a multilingual, multispecies, non-extractive form of alliance. Such practices not only offered moments of healing, but also articulated an ethics of togetherness that resists colonial cartographies and developmental isolation. This was not simply solidarity as representation, but solidarity as affective method.
These experiences affirmed for me a belief that transformative shifts—whether geopolitical or ecological—begin not with systems, but with perception. Perception, in its most intimate and volatile form, begins with the senses. To imagine a South-South alliance not merely as a geopolitical configuration, but as a shared sensorium of entangled difference, is to recognize art not just as symbolic gesture, but as fragile infrastructure for worldmaking. Its volatility is its power: because it leaks, because it resists fixity, because it senses otherwise.
[1] See Francis H. Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), for an accessible exploration of the Buddhist cosmological metaphor of Indra’s Net.
[2] See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Aldine Transaction, 1969), for his foundational work on liminality and ritual space.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to the organizers of the GMS Artist Residency—OCAC, the local team in Loei, the advisors, and my fellow resident artists—for fostering a space of generosity, care, and creative exchange. Special thanks to the Tai Dam village community and their spiritual leader Chao Mae Nang Tiam, as well as the Dansai and Chiang Khan communities, whose time, stories, and ritual knowledge shaped the heart of this project. This work would not have been possible without the warmth and intellectual generosity I encountered throughout the journey.
Let the sun and moon bear witness to our friendship and solidarity—carried by the rivers and rooted in the land, an unbreakable bond shaped by nature’s grace and the currents of the Mekong, which bear our voices, memories, and kinships beyond borders.
References
- Cook, Francis H. Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.
- Espejo Ayca, Elvira. Yanak Uywaña: La crianza mutua de las artes. PCP Programa Cultural Política, 2022.
- Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Difference Without Separability. In e-flux journal, Issue 36, 2012.
- Gaweewong, Gridthiya. “Errata: Collecting Entangled Histories.” In Curating as Feminist Organizing, 2021.
- Noor, Farish A. The Other Malaysia: Writings on Malaysia's Subaltern Histories. Silverfish Books, 2002.
- Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Transaction, 1969.