The mythical figure Dongfang Shuo stealing a peach

Dongfang Shuo (b. 160 BCE) was a courtier at the court of Han Wudi (140–87 BCE) who delighted the emperor with his wit. He became an immortal by eating the peaches he had stolen from the orchard of the Queen Mother of the West. Legend has it that Dongfang Shuo stole these peaches of immortality three times. The peaches flowered every three thousand years, and took another three thousand years to ripen. As a result, he lived for eighteen thousand years.

This work partly inspired Mukherjee’s Extracted. She participated in the 2013 pilot of the Asian Art Museum’s contemporary art program, Artists Drawing Club. She and her graduate class from California College of the Arts presented the Procession of Future Artifacts. Each class member selected an object from the collection to respond to in the form of a performance during the event. Choosing this figure, Mukherjee became interested in the Queen Mother of the West, her peaches of immortality, and her paradise of the west, which sparked the initial idea for Extracted.