Conciliate with Darkness

I've divided my presentation into 3 sections.

First, I’ll express the thought of ‘conciliate with Darkness，it is the title of this presentation as well as my PDF's title

Second part is about how it was reflected in my finished artworks and articles.

Finally, I will share my ongoing project ‘digital salvage‘

Firstly，I would like quote this line.

‘the future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.’

——Virginia Woolf

Darkness is described as the finest thing to come,

and Woolf's choose the expression 'can be, I think' indicate some sort of uncertainty and ambiguity

I found I was particularly interested in Darkness and the feeling of ambiguity.

I think the darkness is the inability to see what is around us .

When I said the word 'see,' I don't mean physically see, but rather mentally discern.

Navigate in Darkness

In my artwork, I intended to divide this contemplation into two parts: navigation and conciliation.

I use navigating in the darkness as a tool to reflect on my self-identity and family story.

Dragon Bone is a continuation of the MA show in which I create a work about family names. Because of my hometown's geography near to Southeast Asia, many individuals have made a living in Southeast Asia for a long time. This link became more common in the 19th and 20th centuries when Western colonisation brought more work opportunities to Southeast Asia, and many Chinese people travelled there to make a living, including my great-grandfather. In this context, darkness represents something unknown to them, a sensation of insecurity, the future, an ocean, or a letter. This context has been covered in my articles ‘Identity map in writing ’and ‘Earthquake’, however these pieces are more focused on the story of the women who remained in their homeland.

click eye, jump to artwork

Click Family photo, jump to the resource

Surnames are also passed down in the process, as I described in unit 2. Many surnames like Chen in Southeast Asia have taken on many versions of spelling because nationalism, colonisation, and the various dialects of China.

In unit 3, I focused on the materials and dimensions of the piece, which I did not satisfied in unit 2. I choose to use silk and plastic beads as my materials after speaking with an uncle who sells fabric in Malaysia. An exhibition about dialects in China will support me to finish the work. I decided to make it as a collaborative work since it would eventually be shipped back to China. I will finish a part of needlework and send to My grandfather's siblings in Southeast Asia to finished rest of it. Then It will send back to China to be completed as a whole. I am still designing it，I need to make sure that the structure of keel can fits together.

Conciliate with Darkness

Right now, I don't think darkness means the unknown or the night. For me, it's more of insecurity about the technology and mediums we currently practising or deploying. And I'm hoping that my work will conciliatewith this darkness.

Weather forecast is my first step to reflect data and technology. It is exhibited in the show dwelling on the cloud. And I wrote an article The margins of Error about prediction about it.

This work was inspired by my grandmother's habit of recording and relying on the weather forecast. I planned to respond to the weather data for that day by images in cloud storage of that day. Then I discovered some interesting photographs on memory album on cloud, including this one, which belongs on the cover of my weekend memories album from October 24,2020, but you can clearly find it has a website logo. It's a photo I downloaded and stored to the cloud, the system consider it as one of my joyful weekend memories from two years ago. This is why I describe the flaws of automatic calculation in my article and it emasculates our sentiments and thoughts. While technology decreases complexity, it can also cause us to lose touch with our subjective sensations and judgments.

Digital Salvage

Here is my ongoing project called digital salvage. it is a cooperation project with Jingtao Yang who study curating and collection.

The name derives from the discovery that many artists and exhibitions increasingly rely on online searches to generate work, and this information on the web make the work become flatten. Because we know that when we salvage content from the internet, the web will recommend similar materials and publications to you based on their popularity and relevance. Behind the scenes, this content even ruled by capital and politics. Many people believe that the internet and technology have made our lives easier, but I question the consequences of such automatic searches. This is the origin of the project's name.

So this project is about crisis and catastrophes, as well as reflection on technology, media, and the internet.

The first work's theme is solar storms, which I refer it to "darkness," the world after the loss of technology and the internet. But I am still working on this project, but we plan to publish something like book，magazine. Ami recommended a lot of fascinating publications in Unit 3, so I thought it would be a wonderful thing to look into these works. Here are some references to our further publications.

Mel Bochner, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, School of the Visual Arts, 1966

Bochner deemed “working drawings,” meaning drawings that “have a purpose other than the merely functional.”

O FLUXO
Co-curation with New Scenario exploring the human orifices as practical exhibition spaces