When I first laid my eyes on Neri Oxman’s Totem series, I thought of amber with insects inside. This series includes three individual pieces, which all resemble those modern, black metal pillars with matte surfaces standing in the entrance of any modern skyscraper. Yet unlike pragmatic columns, they are more ingenious and delicate, standing in the corner of the room, forming a silent triangle. The distances between the three are rather small; one may have to walk sideways to get through this field of unknown forces. But what makes them most particular is their middle part, where the metal is juxtaposed with transparent acrylic-like material, containing tangled indiscernible materials in a gradient ranging from beige to coal gray. A plume of ceased smoke. These fractures of animal extracts compose into the figure of intertwined and sinuous strings in earthly colors, tangling then disappearing into the shafts on both top and bottom ends. Step back afar; the work looks like a container rather than a supportive being: the upper and lower metal parts of the column contain the transparent middle section, which also contains the organism-like sculpture.

    Since the exhibition, Material Ecology, is located on the first floor of the Museum of Modern Art, the silence of Totem series would be merely a few steps away from the boisterousness of West 53rd Street if it was not guarded by the surrounding floor-to-ceiling windows. These towering glass panels serve as another layer of translucent protection, separating the Totems and the world outside. The design of an enclosure being inside another enclosure has always been fascinating. The creators of Jurassic Park may empathize with this notion: who would not be amazed by the idea of extracting the dinosaur blood preserved inside a mosquito trapped in a million-year-old amber?

    Let’s set aside the fictional fantasies for now. The amber, especially the ones with insects, has always been a treasured object bearing symbolic meanings. It has a long history of being used for jewelry that can date back to the Stone Age, which was 13,000 years ago when the dawn of human civilization had just arrived. The archeological records hint at a variety of uses of amber throughout the ages, though some still lack supportive evidence. Roman historian Pliny recorded amber being carved into figurines, fashioned into truffle-cutting knives, made into artificial gems or practical products such as drinking cups and arms, and in Syria used for spindle whorls. It was also burned as fuel, or burned for its scent. Burning such precious material was regarded essential for offerings, for communication between the human and the divine. Indeed, those uses that were by nature magical or tied up with superstition are unlikely to have been referred to other than obliquely in any mainstream literature, although they were extensive and widely acknowledged from very early on, through the Classical era and well into the Middle Ages.

    The primary question about amber is its origin. Attempts to reveal where it originated, from the early Greek poets to Late Antique authors, were made in a wide variety of disciplines including philosophy, poetry, history, natural science, and even pharmacology. For ancient Greeks, the consensus was that amber represents the congealed tears of the Heliades, the Daughters of the Sun, which they shed when they saw their brother Phaëthon, ‘the Shining One,’ tumble out of the sky. The girls were turned into poplars and continued to weep forever after, which may reflect the intuition that amber has something to do with tree resin. But their main association is with sunlight. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, the chorus sings, “O that I could soar aloft over the sea swell to the shore of the Adriatic and the waters of Eridanus, where into the deep-blue wave the luckless girls, in grief for Phaëthon, drop the amber gleaming sunlight of their tears!” The poet emphasizes how the daughters of the Sun shed radiant tears of light, which congeal when they fall into the water and wash up on the seashore as amber.

    Other than the mythological story and literature, the most significant and the most varied answers came from perspectives that were scientific and geographical. However diverse the various origin stories are, they explain amber either as being related to the Sun or the planets, or as being “of water” or “of earth.” In short, for our ancestors, amber is the romanticized byproduct of the higher beings’ grief, a symbol for death, fire, tears, and solid light.

    Modern science has proved that amber is fossilized tree resin, a combination of resinous bodies and hydrocarbon. Not all old resin could have the valuable opportunity to become amber if it cannot survive the exposure to sunlight, rain, microorganisms, and extreme temperatures. Like other fossils, it must be able to endure time and pressure. As for those which happened to trap any ancient insects, they are creations of nature and chance, with a bit of help from gravity. A captured eternal moment.

    The formation of amber was a reason that I connected Oxman’s work with it. But there is another embedded connection between these two. As the whole exhibition is composed of artifacts demonstrating the capacity of the cutting-edge 3-D printing technology, one cannot help but wonder: how will they, these human-made fossils, be interpreted in the future? Moreover, while amber can resolve back in the form of liquid under relatively high temperature, these materials in the display are much more stable, thus, long-lasting. Despite the nature of the materials, the appearance of the Totem series also implies a sense of persistence — standing tall, fighting against gravity, supporting the ceiling.

    Hence the three columns became more like monuments to me — monuments for the future to view. These monuments have the opposite meanings to the ancient Egyptian obelisks, which are not erected presences of the achievements of our era, but manifestations of how we imagine the possible tomorrow — an archeological discovery in reserve for the future.

    However, unlike the once mysterious amber, the Totem holds no mysteries. As much as we are enchanted by the artist’s creativity and the capability of rapidly developing technologies, these synthetic compositions of aluminum, steel, melanins from bird feathers, squid ink, mushroom enzyme, tyrosine, and alkaline water can never be the fossils of this contemporary world. As much as they try to depict the future, they are only able to address the present. No matter how much the installation and amber resemble each other, the Totem series is a pseudo-amber, or a monument of modern technology’s residue.

    Or maybe there are no attempts for forecasting at all. The melanin inside may still be able to grow and spread, then gradually change the skin color of the sculpture, in which sense, making it take on the opposite position to the changeless amber. An unfinished piece, initiated by the human yet can only be continued by time. As amber represents a captured moment, the Totems is an ongoing documentation of time and material changes. In other words, they interact differently with time: for amber, it takes only one crucial moment for the making and after which the interaction becomes passive; but for the Totem, time is a collaborative factor, making the Totem a work always for the present, rather than for the future. There will be no final form of it since time cannot be paused or stopped. It is the monument of every single present moment, which can only evolve towards the future of the unknown.