Huile de vitre collects two series of short stories written between 2023 and 2025 by Paris-based, Chinese-born artist and writer Shuo Hao, whose work explores iconography, symbolism and mythology in Western and Eastern culture.
The title of this collection, Huile de vitre (French for 'glass oil'), is borrowed from Gaston Bachelard's The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Glass oil is a substance that does not exist. Shuo Hao says, 'The transformation of glass into oil resembles the mystical exchange between spirit and matter—when life becomes death, death is reborn, the five elements rotate, energy circulates, and all things are neither created or destroyed, endless and infinite.'