Specimen of Memory

In the end of 2004 I commenced a series work I called "Specimen of Memory".

This project came from my memory. When I was a little child, a doctor erroneously diagnosed and treated me, resulting in a scar on my right eye cornea. My eyesight was significantly impaired, I couldn't feel objects three-dimensionally and couldn't judge the actual distances between myself and things.

But my eyesight was given back ten years later, thanks to a donor from Sri Lanka. One day the cornea from an unknown donor was transported to Taiwan, and after surgery the tissue of a stranger began to be a part of me. Since that time, the world I have experienced is partly through a past stranger.

When I got my driver's license in the US I immediately signed up as a donor. I thought, not without romantic ideas, perhaps after I die, this cornea might be transplanted to someone else...

An imagined scene often occurred in my head: In an airplane, a cornea encased in a frozen container was transported to another country. The cornea still carried the memory of the past life of its owner.

 

A space can be read, and words can be used to build...

The experience of having a transplanted cornea inspired me to create the series of "Specimen of Memory". I produced the specimens of sensual organs: eyes, ears, mouths and noses, and I sealed their sections in transparent plates. Thus the memories contained in these organs were transformed into the form of a journal. The audience can see through the spatial structure inside, and as the audiences change their angles, they see different layers of graphics, signs, words that can be read from the three-dimensional arrangement of sections. It seems that they could leap out and suspend in the air, breaking away from the separation of book pages and array themselves to form an axis of time.

 

Machine Symbols

Human beings have an intrinsic nature of loneliness. We live in groups only for the purpose of reproducing themselves, so we struggle all our lifetime in such a paradox.

Gears are like people, they can only move or function when one is connected to another. One's teeth bite the body of the others and also being bitten by the others, otherwise every gear would rotate in vain and the whole machine stops. The closer the two gears are, the bigger bites they have on each other and are creating greater power. The price is each of them enjoys less freedom; they are deeply bound in the system.

 

Chinese Landscape and Engineering Graphics

Texts and drawings often coexist in traditional Chinese landscapes. On the blank spaces where drawings fail to express, words take over. Drawings and words extend for each other, there are words in painting and painting in words. It is the wonderful legacy of Chinese culture. Chinese landscapes lead the eyes of the audience with paint brushes, and a spiritual journey on painting is the essence of art appreciation in Chinese culture.

In my art I pursue the same style of appreciation. Images not unlike engineering graphics lure the audience to follow the delusional machine. It was originally for the appreciation of natural scenery but has been transformed into the illustrations of mechanic civilization, similar to my statement for the project "Autumn Moon":

Man-made environment has replaced nature without our awareness.

Constructed reservoir, for example, has affected earth rotation. Experts have discovered that, over the past four decades, reservoirs all over the world have blocked about one thousand billion tons of water. It speeds up the rotation of the earth 8-millionth second a day, resulting in 60cm slanting backward of the earth's axis.

The four seasons we are so familiar with are to be changed by industrial civilization without being noticed. How long the poetic scenes "hundreds of flowers in spring; bright moon in autumn" will last? We are changing our surroundings consciously or unconsciously. Will one day artificial objects seamlessly mix into nature?

Satellites and moon rise together; radars and sunflowers turn to follow the orbit of sun in unison. Weather satellites and palm grass provide equally accurate information about clouds; the electromagnetic waves of mobile phones are radiating as the sun does.

Appreciating the moon in breeze in my backyard, I wonder is there a festival for machines coming?

 

 

image from the Scent Condensing Morgue

a page from the Lotus City

 

About Lucite

Lucite was a material invented by DuPont during the World War II. It was used as the bullet-proof glass for airplane driver's cabin. Applying a material once for military use in art brings me overwhelming romantic feelings.