Nines of Winter

Nines of Winter, 2020

Nines of Winter

a study, December 12, 2020- March 11, 2021

Counting the nine nine-days, 数九, of the winter season is a popular folklore Winter Solstice tradition in ancient China and arguably one of the longest standing citizen science project. On Winter Solstice day, Dong Zhi, 冬至, one starts with a 9 by 9 grid or empty chart, and fill in each day till the chart is full after 81 days. One day at a time, one mark the grid with the observation of each day’s weather condition or just by the passage of time. This tradition was documented in literature around 500 AD, but might have been practiced among the people way earlier and have many artistic variations on form.

Nine is the largest number in Chinese culture, symbolizing the maximum and the fullest extent. As a traditional practice, counting the nine-days was a way to get through the cold and harsh winter, one day at a time. When the ninth of the nine-days is reached, it’ll be spring. The daily action of this countdown and seeing the gradually filled up grid manifests people’s anticipation of spring, of warmth, and a new growing season.

The winter of 2020 is a long winter for many who lived through it. It marked the one year of the outbreak of a global pandemic. So much lost and sorrow was present in the past year, and the winter monthes seemed even more so bleak and cold. The cold weather also meant less time spent outside, and more time in isolation and quarantine.

On the Winter Solstice of 2020, December 21, 2020, I started filling in an 9 by 9 grid with the weather observation of that day, marked by a legend system I created to represent what the sky looked like: sunny, cloudy, windy, rainy, and snow. This observation was how the sky looked to me, sometimes only through window and fire escape. With each day’s observation, the grid started to get full. In the midst of the seemingly repetitive cold and gloomy days, and when each day seemed more and more homogenized with majority of the time spent inside, seeing the grid being fill up to 1/3, half way through, and then 2/3 through, was the visual confirmation that each passing day was leading closer to a warm spring day.

The ninth of the nine-days ended on March 11, 2021. Spring was just around the corner, all the snowfall from the winter had melted into the soil, vaccines were made available to more people, seeds started germinating, nature was awaking, and the city was revitalizng with energy again. After documenting the 81 long days in what felt like the longest winter in recent history, spring is here, and so is hope.