text by Lee Mei-cheng
In terms of aesthetics, authentic life ought to be elsewhere. When one lives elsewhere, there are
dreams, arts, poetry. When elsewhere becomes here, sublimity turns immediatey into the other
side of life: cruelty. ── Jing Kaixuan on Milan Kundera's Life is Elsewhere
It is doubtless that people recognize the cruelty of life in history or from their own experience. To
imagine a better life elsewhere is like a placebo shot, yet the cruelty of life that foster pessimism
could also incite will of resistance. Our life is so much entangled, weaved with trivialities it
becomes an ever-enlarging web that is burdened with morals, social hierarchies, identities and
fame, etc. As such, time presses us to chase a life whose only objective and hope lies in a
volatile sense of “recognition”. As Kundera says, “Death becomes real as it creeps into the heart
through the cracks of age”. The substance of our life is thus timed, that there will be a time for
sadness and happiness, a time for consciousness and doubts, a time for lightness and
heaviness.
Crush Syndrome showcases the installation works of Tania TSONG and LU Chih-Yun, who treat
materials light and heavy as paper, iron and concrete, in painting ( reproduction ), collage
( transplant ), weaving ( criss-cross ), casting ( imitation ). Their works do not depict merely an
everyday aesthetics, rather, various media are utilized as records of history and trifling emotions
and thoughts. The exhibition is weighty in terms of bodily senses, but the curatorial aim is not to
explore the grave meaning of the proverb ''light as a goose feather, heavy as Mount Tai''. For the
post-80s generation of Tania and LU, their pragmatism concerns more with the quality of life
than lofty ideals. If ''to govern a country is like cooking a small fish'', the same may apply in
creative endeavors: that having learnt the basics one can invent new dishes with different food
ingredients’ properties. The taste may please some and not others, but the difference lies only in
presentation and the philosophy of cooking.
How do we demarcate what is real and what is not in things we see every day? The Buddhists
believe that phenomena exist only in our mind. Our cognition comes from accumulated
experiences, and reality is thus interpreted. Time becomes the container in which trivialities of
everyday life are stacked, it resets itself to zero every 24 hours and the accumulation will start
anew. There may be more than one answer to the question whether it is grave to consider the
substance of life, but if time could be reset to zero our fear of its heavy significance is
ungrounded. |
