text by Maggie Hsun-Wei Hsu
“The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.” -W.B.Yeats
I tred thousand-miles as “spiritual nomad,” travel and nest in temporary lodges of imageries, fleet between reality and phantasm, and roam in realms of memory and the deceased. Our short existence is but an interim between life and death, make-art become a private-play of organizing fragmentary images. I want to come out of this world, into a spiritual world of exile. Nevertheless, ensnared by the wish to re-make, I am loaded with non-stories, and trying to capture the visible and the invisible, telling stories of the existent and the non-existent beings. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty has said, “listen to the indirect languages and the sound of silence” of the invisible.
Having a cold metallic outlook, yet being thin and frail, aluminum foil ideally becomes my vehicle as metaphor of the post-industrial phenomenon. “The industrial membrane (the foil)” becomes a maternal womb, ceaselessly wrapping and giving re-birth with embryonic embrace, tantalizing hope and desire, anxiety and disillusionment. Having taken their “Journeys,” through death and regeneration, the wrapped entities then re-enter the world of the mundane.
In my recent mixed media works, human body parts disappeared, bowing humbly in respect, behavior and action became part of the art-works’ hidden meaning. Entity’s extension, transformation and disappearance suggest a reversed state of being, transcend present state of existence and the environment. I want to hide in the invisible expanse of retreat, travel through spiritual-land, and poke with the imageries neglected deep underneath. |
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