• Date: 27 October 2025 (Monday) to 23 November 2025 (Sunday)

• Venue: Exhibition Area, G/F, University Library, CUHK

• Opening hours: Weekdays: 8:20am – 10pm｜Saturdays: 8:20am – 7pm｜
  Sundays: 11am – 7pm (Please refer to the University Library for the latest opening hours.)

About the exhibition

Mudra, a Sanskrit term, refers to symbolic hand gestures widely seen in Hindu and Buddhist art. These gestures are also central to Bharatanatyam, the classical Indian dance that Ashwini Bhat has studied for seventeen years. The sonnet, traditionally a fourteen-line poem with a set rhyme scheme, serves as both inspiration and a structural framework for Forrest Gander, who has spent two decades reimagining its form in contemporary poetry.

Just as a sequence of mudras can convey meaning and emotion through subtle movement, the sonnet shapes narrative with its formal constraints. In this exhibition, lenticular prints add another dimension: words and images appear or fade depending on the viewer’s angle, creating a dynamic experience of revelation and concealment.

Here, Bhat’s fourteen mudras and Gander’s corresponding single-line poems are interwoven like two sonnets, inviting visitors to reflect on gesture, language, intimacy, and interdependence.

About the Artists

Ashwini Bhat (1980 – , United States)
Ashwini Bhat is a transdisciplinary artist who spent thirty-five years in southern India and now lives and works at the foothills of Sonoma Mountain, California. With a background in literature and classical Indian dance, her creative practice spans sculpture, ceramics, installation, and video, developing a distinctive visual language that explores the intersections between body and nature, self and other. Her work shows the influence of syncretic shrines and rituals and non-logocentric and non-Western metaphysical concepts of empathy for the non-human.

Forrest Gander (1956 – , United States)
Forrest Gander is an internationally renowned American poet, writer, translator, and interdisciplinary collaborator, known for integrating literature, science, and the arts. Born in California’s Mojave Desert, he holds degrees in geology and English literature—an academic background that deeply shapes his writing on landscape, ecology, and human relationships. Gander has taught at Harvard University and is the A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Organiser: Faculty of Arts

Co-organiser: University Library

Enquiry: airp@cuhk.edu.hk