People seek happiness, knowledge, belonging, they discover, collect and narrate. In the spirit of these narratives, artist Yuki Jungesblut set out to find the mythical Kirin in the lands around the East China Sea. This noble, gentle creature heralds peace, justice and happiness and is of hybrid nature, with the head of a dragon, the body and legs of an ox or deer, scaled and clad in fire.
Kirin Quest, inspired by Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, tells the story of this quest and invites the reader on a journey between imagination, fiction and reality that connects different worlds and times. The book weave a web of impressions of a region, of exchange and trade, gods and rocks, nature and culture, East and West, present, pasts and futures. Like its namesake, this book is hybrid in nature, part travelogue, part artist’s book, and just as much the narrative of a dream of discovering the world and the rewriting of a temporary utopia.

Yuki Jungesblut, *1974 in Hamburg, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.