(2023)
“Some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do-not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs.”
── Ralph Waldo Emerson
In only a few decades, those raw, natural experiences have become a thing of the past, now entangled with an inescapable confusion and artificiality.
A Chinese child's childhood home was poetic and close to nature. From noon to 2 p.m., I remember the sunlight magnifying the shadows of the dense foliage and casting them on the bathroom shutters. When the breeze drove the shadows on the shutters with dazzling white light, it was the closest thing to heaven. A few decades later, concrete filled my home, cameras replaced sight, and technology became the medium for seeing the outside world. We were by then reduced to outsiders in this vast world, beholding nature strangely.
I tried to reconstruct my childhood memory of the shutters in the woods. And when it was moved into the concrete SAIC building to be displayed to the class, I realized that it could no longer remain as pure and intuitive as it once was. Rather, it gradually became chaotic. First, it was reborn in a concrete space, then it was framed and archived by the camera, and now it is confined in a glass window. The pedestrian in front of the exhibition window looks through layers of artificial media- glass windows, photographs, concrete spaces- what he gets is a tangled product of pure naturalness and mixed artificiality. When this pristine natural scene becomes overwhelmingly strange and chaotic, it is a sense of despondency and loss.
Events
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL