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Scarlett Guan

Exploring language, space, and contemporary rituals through art.

  • Home
  • About
  • Works
    • Coal & Ash Drawings
    • Installation & Objects
    • Performance & Photo Works
    • Research Projects
      • Material Experiments
  • Blogs
    • Bird Series
    • Look On My Works!
    • Poetry Paintings: Coal, Ash, and the Materiality of Resistance
    • To Knot Is to Hope
  • Writings
  • Contact
Scarlett Guan

Exploring language, space, and contemporary rituals through art.

A Civilization of Blood

A short poem on pain, bleeding, empathy, and force.

  • Scarlett GuanScarlett Guan
  • July 27, 2026
  • Poetry, Writings

My period
is my Achilles’ heel.

Truly:
without it,
I would already have built a communist society.

Women are born into pain.
We do not need war
in order to bleed,
in order to feel with others.

What looks like the most vulnerable feeling,
pain,
also holds enormous force.

What is civilisation?

Abstract drawing made with collected cigar ash, depicting two leg-like forms referencing Shelley’s Ozymandias — a meditation on the fragility of power and memory.
Previous Post Language and Ash
Next Post Starfire at Twenty-Three

Related Posts

Touch

  • July 27, 2026

Starfire at Twenty-Three

  • July 27, 2026
Abstract drawing made with collected cigar ash, depicting two leg-like forms referencing Shelley’s Ozymandias — a meditation on the fragility of power and memory.

Language and Ash

  • July 27, 2026

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