SHANSHAN JIANG
Moon Bound: Water Between Earth and Moon
A contribution to Moon Gallery Foundation’s miniature artists’ book for the Moon
Water, gravity, perception and ink-thinking at planetary scale
Shanshan Jiang (Anne)
Artist / Contributor
Moon Gallery Foundation
2025–2026
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This project extends my water-and-ink practice from terrestrial surfaces to planetary relations: tides, lunar gravity, perception, and the question of how the Moon might see the Earth.
Moon Bound: Water Between Earth and Moon presents my contribution to Moon Gallery Foundation’s Moon Bound, a 1 cm³ miniature artists’ book gathering responses from artists, writers and creatives around the world to the question: How does the Moon see the Earth?My contribution extends my ongoing practice with water, ink, paper and environmental perception into a planetary context. Through writing and image, I consider water as the medium through which Earth and Moon remain physically, perceptually and ontologically connected: tides, reflection, gravity, bodily perception and material flow.For me, the Moon is not only an object in the sky, but a force registered through water. The project asks how artistic practice can sense this relation: how ink, water and perception might become a small earthly response to a lunar gaze.
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Moon Bound is a miniature artists’ book initiated by Moon Gallery Foundation. The book is a 1 cm³ volume collecting text and image submissions from 48 contributors, alongside statements and manifestos that situate the project within Moon Gallery’s wider ambition for the representation of art in space.The project is structured around the question: How does the Moon see the Earth? Rather than treating the Moon only as a destination, Moon Bound opens a space for reflection on art, space exploration, cultural memory, intellectual property beyond Earth, and the future of artistic practice in extraterrestrial contexts.
My contribution to Moon Bound developed through two connected forms: image and writing. I contributed an ink-based image and a series of reflective texts that examine water as a mediator between Earth and Moon. The writing moves between physical tides, moonlit perception, water’s material agency and the entanglement of body, sea and celestial rhythm. It extends questions already present in my painting practice: how water records forces, how surfaces hold memory, and how human perception becomes altered when it encounters water as an active presence.
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Tidal Resonance: Water Between Earth and Moon
In Tidal Resonance: Water Between Earth and Moon, I write about water as a responsive medium between Earth and Moon. Tides are not understood only as a physical phenomenon, but as a planetary rhythm that shapes perception, life, artistic experience and the imagination of relation.The text follows three forms of resonance: physical, perceptual and ontological. Physically, lunar gravity moves the oceans. Perceptually, moonlit water alters human attention and reflection. Ontologically, Earth, Moon and water appear not as separate entities, but as a shared system of movement, attraction and response.
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Perception — Being — Flow: An Ink-and-Water Meditation
Perception — Being — Flow reflects on my wider ink-and-water practice. It considers the act of painting as a co-creative process between body, water, ink, paper, gravity, humidity and time.In this writing, I describe myself not as a controller of materials, but as a vessel through which water and ink can generate form. This understanding becomes central to my later projects: water is not a passive medium, but an active force that records, translates and transforms.
Micro Book / Process
The scale of Moon Bound radically changes the act of reading. Text and image are compressed into a miniature volume, requiring magnification, careful handling and a different bodily relation to the book.For me, this scale resonates with ink practice: both ask how vast forces can be held in small surfaces. In Moon Bound, planetary imagination is folded into a volume small enough to rest between fingertips.
Moon Bound expanded my water-based practice from site-specific environments to planetary relations. While my later projects focus on urban water interfaces, field archives and surface evidence, Moon Bound allowed me to think about water at the scale of Earth and Moon: tides, gravity, reflection, distance and relational perception. This project helped me understand water not only as material or subject, but as a mediator between bodies, surfaces and worlds. It forms an important bridge between my ink painting practice, my writing, and my current research into water systems, surface memory and environmental traces.
