Through the Looking-Glass
2024
Wearable Sculpture，Performance
Dimensions variable
I want to explore language in this project. Language often exerts a magical power to confuse people in relationships. Although language is created by people, it also possesses hypnosis and power when it is used by people.
Lacan believes that language is fundamentally duplicitous. It tricks its users. The creative process of using language cannot produce something authentic; it can only make people believe it is real. Language can never equal the things it describes; it merely refers to them. This is akin to a "trick," leaving the question unanswered: what is real? In the world constructed by language, nothing is truly authentic. Experience is a synthesis of images and the language used to describe those images.
I often harbor a curious yet fearful sentiment towards language. Language is an imitation of reality, essentially mistaking a fiction for truth, and this holds true even when it is applied to itself. When humans use language in different contexts, they seem to be hypnotized and manipulated by the language itself within that context.
Language seems like an independently existing entity, both expressing and constraining the cognition of the subject. I have discovered that this subtle absence of language and sense of control are embodied in passages from the book "Through the Looking-Glass," which I loved reading as a child.
By imitating the textual descriptions in the book (echoing the parody of language on reality), I crafted the costume of this monster that does not exist in the book, intending it to be a language entity with subtle magic that exists independently. On a weekday afternoon, I recited this poem on an empty overpass in Shanghai, where beneath the bridge, people in the city wandered through different contexts like sleepwalkers, their words appearing and disappearing strangely.
Lacan believes that language is fundamentally duplicitous. It tricks its users. The creative process of using language cannot produce something authentic; it can only make people believe it is real. Language can never equal the things it describes; it merely refers to them. This is akin to a "trick," leaving the question unanswered: what is real? In the world constructed by language, nothing is truly authentic. Experience is a synthesis of images and the language used to describe those images.
I often harbor a curious yet fearful sentiment towards language. Language is an imitation of reality, essentially mistaking a fiction for truth, and this holds true even when it is applied to itself. When humans use language in different contexts, they seem to be hypnotized and manipulated by the language itself within that context.
Language seems like an independently existing entity, both expressing and constraining the cognition of the subject. I have discovered that this subtle absence of language and sense of control are embodied in passages from the book "Through the Looking-Glass," which I loved reading as a child.
By imitating the textual descriptions in the book (echoing the parody of language on reality), I crafted the costume of this monster that does not exist in the book, intending it to be a language entity with subtle magic that exists independently. On a weekday afternoon, I recited this poem on an empty overpass in Shanghai, where beneath the bridge, people in the city wandered through different contexts like sleepwalkers, their words appearing and disappearing strangely.