I IS ANOTHER
12/04/21 - 02/05/21
“I is another” initiated from a piece of etching and lithography print called “Self Seduction” that I made in 2018. It is inspired by the religious iconography in relation to the gesture of hands. I came across with the Creation of Adam by Michelangelo from Sistine Chapel during my childhood. The essence of touch in it is unresolved. Their desire of wanting to be touched or touch amplifies my sensory and speaks out to me throughout my whole youth. The distance between God and Adam seems to be so close but also so far away from each other. The notion of uncertainties brings into a lot of misery for that specific moment of time. Is it an end or a beginning of an event? It is a question without an answer but the question from a picture allows time to pause into eternity. It is a process of creation alongside with potential destructions that was about to happen.
The entire series of work were produced in 2020. Touch has become a sensitive word to us. We have contactless devices everywhere nowadays to avoid any physical touch with others. I began to be really aware of my own hands when the world was in lockdown/when time stopped. I lived by myself in a small apartment and I did not see anyone for three, four months. Relationships with others were cut off and I started to have a very close connection with my own hands that I touched the most. The images of friends and family in the screen turn into an abstract surreality. The extreme isolation brought in my childhood question about the fragility of separation and touches again.
Touch leads to separation and separation leads to touch. They are intertwined with multiple layers that exist in our physical world. We are constantly living in this cycle of bubble. The bubble becomes picture frames, which enclose us how to perform. “I is another” is taken from a phrase of Arthur Rimbaud’s poems. “I” became an avatar who is performing for others and “Others” completed me in the picture. It symbolises the alternative characters who live inside my mind are able to interact with me. The relationship in between one another is tightly tied, inseparable.
“I” and “Another” is the duality, just like a picture and a frame require each other to be activated. It leads to the following writing that was written by one of the others. The subtext is the fine edge of collision in reality and imagination. It is a shared memory and conversation that we both engaged throughout the past four years.
Who are you, asks the seer
in this struggle against the world’s order against the life, your own voice?
Who is the seer, you may well ask. ‘La voyant’ one once called. It turns invisible into visible. A translator of the feelings which transcend the seer itself.
It’d also been referred as an instrument. Just as the violin and the armchair are both made of wood, they said, the seer and the others are made of flesh and bones. A violin, as you know, might not be aware of what music it plays.
Therefore the seer constantly tries to grasp the changes happening in itself, yet it might not entirely understand who itself is.
The seer has an immense ability of revival. It can transform the eyes of the others.
Instead of “I see” it says “they see through me”.
Perpetually disarranging all the senses within consciousness the seer becomes the seer. It distorts the vision for others to see impurities. Being able to distinguish impurities makes your vision become clearer.
The seer also works as a mixer of reality.
Separating the layers of the physical world, amplifying its sensations by touching each of the senses, letting them touch and drift each other, rendering their meanings to reach for a higher reality —a surreality, overlapping the layers back again, causing new interpretations, new perceptions, new values of the universe to occur.
By the end of the process nothing seems even anymore. You can come across with a pair of flying feet with wings —not only for the gods to wear.
It distorts to restore. Creation always goes hand in hand with destruction.
None of the letters is capitalized in the seer’s dictionary.
Neither this is an imaginary universe nor the seer is isolated in it for the seer is the multiplier of reality.
It asks who you are and offers a new way of connection. A connection in-between new realities. Just let the seer touch you. Hold hands and let it take you to a walk to the mystery of things. One of the others once said: “Just you keep holding my hands, I know everything’ll be fine” and never let go since then.
Allow me to commemorate another one: I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed, he said, from the wiser to the other as two people touch.
The touch of the seer turns all hearts into glowing diamonds.
It tries all the poisons to come up with the potions. It burns itself to eternize the luminescence.
Although the seer may look like a fire thief it only works for itself. In all forms of love, fear, suffering, madness it looks for itself. The rest is nothing but a byproduct.
The eye of the seer sees the others.
The I of the seer is the others.