text by Yuan Goang-Ming
I have a recurring dream that goes like this: On a late, cold and moonlit night I gradually become aware of a body floating on a boundless sea.
In 2004, I established my permanent residence in an abandoned building Facing emptiness and desolation all around me as I worked to create a home, the building seemed to occupy a place in my mind. Poetic feelings of faded splendor still swell up whenever I explore the nearby abandoned buildings. Forsaken furniture, books, clothes and decorations in these buildings all recall the history, lifestyle and atmosphere of a home; while making me wonder what the original residents are doing now. The feeling of history imparted by this place continually leaps between the past, present and future.
In 2009, four months after the birth of my first child, my father died of stomach cancer. For those four months I faced the incompatibility of a new and fading life. Imagining my child's future and tracing my father's past, I thought of the time when my father returned to China to visit relatives, and later, after his sister who lived there passed away, his waning interest in traveling to his hometown. Once when I suggested we go there together, he refused. It seemed as if the connection to his hometown was severed, like a broken mooring of a balloon slowly drifting to the most distant horizons of his mind. Over the sixty years he lived here in what was to him a foreign land, my father often practiced calligraphy and sometimes sang Beijing opera for his own amusement. I especially remember him singing the lines “I'm just like a caged bird that can't spread its wings; I'm just like a lost tiger that longs for the mountains” from the opera Yang Silang Visits His Mother.
As my days filled with the poetry of abandoned buildings, a happy home and the cycle of life and death, I started to wonder about a person's state of mind before the production of memories. What image of the world does a baby have right after its birth? Is an infant's first look at the world, before any learning or socialization, truly pure? Is the mind a blank slate before it produces any memories, or is it just a mass of confusion? When confronting memory, how do we imagine or describe the feeling of ourselves situated in flowing time?
By entitling this exhibition Before Memory, I intend to use “before” in two ways. One suggests linear time, a state of mind before one has created memories. The other is the before suggested by confronting memories, as in the memory before someone, or “in front of” someone. In terms of time, memory not only indicates the past, but is also related to the present. As our minds continually scan back and forth in the flow of time, memories arise together with imagination. For example, without being fully aware we usually fill in the gaps in memory with imagination when recalling a childhood home, a scene from a hometown, deceased friends or family, a familiar city or even magnificent architectural ruins.
It is difficult to deal with, describe or name this original state before memory. While trying to experience this state of mind directly might be the only way to do so, it is also futile. This state before memories is elusive like something aimlessly floating on a boundless sea or the interior of a black hole. Perhaps approaching this black hole will bring this original state of mind into focus, getting us closer, and will also thereby allow us to recognize that our inherent selves actually arise from darkness.
(Statement for the Solo Exhibition at TKG+ Gallery 2011.09.24-11.06)
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