You wake as a butterfly as a person as a butterfly. What are you: a butterfly dream of a person, or the personified mode of a butterfly? Zhuangzi’s story reflects on the false dichotomy between dream-space and reality-space, and suggests that to abolish these distinctions is what it means to be lucid. The works of sinθ #22 “LUCID 醒” move through similar thematics: what it means to be conscious, to be aware—whether being lucid is a possibility at all, given the fragmented realities we inhabit and move between.

In this issue:
— Gracing our front cover and multiple spreads in sinθ #22 is Erica Zhang’s glowing 3D media works; Six Kilometers’ vibrant portrait, “Admonitions of the stars 星星的諫言” features on our back cover.
— Editor Laetitia Keok interviews poet Yanyi; they discuss writing his second book, Dream of the Divided Field, and what it means to exercise radical honesty and presentness in creative work through grief.
— KAFEI’s pencil sketches depict everyday scenes from the lives of the rebellious and eccentric; Anson Li’s “Daffodil” is a dreamy, fantasy-driven work in graphite and colored pencil.
— Print Designer Miki Wong chats with architect-turned-interdisciplinary artist Chong Yan Chuah, who speaks about the complex relations between human identity and the virtual realm and the Malaysian art scene.
— Alan Dai’s short story, “Snake Huntin’ is Serious Business”, is a hallucinatory read on sleep medication.
— Editor Eli Hsieh speaks to writer Lan Samantha Chang on The Family Chao (which released on 3 Feb) gastronomical desire, and intergenerational loss.
— In “On Entomophagy”, Juliette Wu works through the commercialisation of eating insects, its roots in Asian cuisine, and food colonialism.
— Editor-in-chief Jiaqi Kang features Jess Routley for our Student Spotlight; they discuss Routley’s \experiences in art school and community building.
— Poems by david ezra wang, Heart White, Fiona Lu, Maggie Wang, Matt Hsu, Karen Zheng, and Nora Hikari.