+ words

Language, matter, thing as image before I can touch 

2023. NOV

Language, matter, thing as image before I can touch, together I call it world.

“The text does not comment more on the images than the images illustrate the text, vice versa. These are two series of sequences that naturally intersect and signal to each other, but attempting to confront them in a comparative manner would be futile. Therefore, we should approach them in a disorderly, plain, and reduplicated fashion…” Chris Marker wrote this in the beginning of his book Le Dépays.

They are the same thing since the beginning: before the invention of writing systems, ancestors drew in the cave, capturing other species, rituals and maybe little things like “I adore you.” Later on, the descendants who use hieroglyph may have the grip on this truth better. And now a phrase like “Chris Marker” can trigger a series of linguistic and visual modes of meaning-making, associating, while a portrait of him alone may lead to some questioning. However, when they are side by side, nothing but a dry fact left.

Critical thinking should be paralyzed here. No starting point nor an end, no grid nor route, no weight nor order, diffuse images and texts. I believe that we are immersing in this eternal uncertain paradox, inadvertently weaving connections, engaging in the infinite recursions of meanings embedded in language and looking, and composing our own polyphonic chants. The focus is neither on the understanding of the text or the image, but landing on the dynamic tension in between, usually appear as air in white. This is the ground for my work. 

Make sense but also stop making sense

2023.NOV

Make sense but also stop making sense. Use five senses against an order.

“Orderless”/“chaos” is a quality I’m obsessed with, as within it the space full of possibilities and inclusiveness is thus created. This might arises from my fear of making mistakes which maybe the human nature or the highlight of my Leo ego or some childhood trauma. The progress of technology is essentially a reduction in fault tolerance. The machines, devices surround us inevitably shaped our attitude as we using it. And somehow the fault tolerance of society is following the development of technology as “science” is the new faith.

One thing that I can be sure of is that I am better at making mistakes than a machine, and I should be proud of it. I approach the state of orderless by “misunderstanding” and re-enchantment. It’s a patriarchal correctness that I am asked to understand. It’s a not-male narrative that I am living in. It’s an imperialistic tongue that I am speaking. It’s a ruler’s answer that I’m command to accept. Therefore, I see misunderstanding as a way to crack the system, to… “Actually, you know what, me trying to justifying the orderless and misunderstanding is already a failure…”

“One day I was sleeping, I closed my eyes, but I saw grandma licking my face in my eyes.”, Maruko told me for the first time about something happened during her sleep after she learned how to speak. I didn’t want to tell her that is called a dream, though I did for the sake of the other. “You live in my eyes” sounds like a more accurate truth. Maybe a grandma’s double self did want to move her tongue like a frog and just lick. Who said one can only have one single self?

Let’s make a space for gibberish and savage, which I believe that pointing to “poetic”, like they said hysteria shows the truth.