Oil on canvas, ceramic, woods, 2020
I was driving on the road one night when I decided to listen to different versions of a Debussy piece by different performers because a friend and I spent the day talking about classical music and I wanted to train my ear to tell its subtleties. I drove slowly at 40km/h, both eyes pulled to the flashing LED signboards that flanked my sides. The Impressionist music contrasted against the man-made lighting fixtures and I felt like i was in a sci-fi movie. This sci-fi sensation brought about a tiredness and fear: for we are always being watched. By the flashing LED, by the blown-up text, by the vibrant colours. We are fed by an overwhelming amount of information and violent aesthetics that cause us to lose sight.
When you live in the city for too long, you start to lose sight, start to forget how to see. The mountain you imagine becomes a single green, the sea you imagine becomes a single blue. March last year in Thailand I drove five hours from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi to reach and find the waterfall. When I arrived at the hotel the sun was already beginning to set. I sat at the riverbank with my beer, the fog rising and covering the trees, the surface of the river, the small boat, the divers with a translucent white. As the sun set, beneath the white were lights in purple, orange, red.
Have you ever been struck still by a natural scene? This was it. The river with the fog was changing every second. Every second it became a new appearance. That day I watched the scene for more than an hour, until darkness fell, until it was only black.
This is our most basic human connection with nature, to restore the sensitivity back into our sight, to restore our bodies’ ability to experience time, to go inward, to touch the soul.
In the process of preparing for this work I kept asking myself: how can I as a creator retain the autonomy of our seeing? By returning to nature, to our bodies’ natural ability to see, to escape from those rules of seeing, or how society has taught us how to see. In painting and in sculpture, we can begin to see from the image, from the text, from the colour. Or we can eventually see by examining the layering of mark over mark and their relationship with time and space as a return to a fundamental way of seeing, to give up our inherited ways of seeing, to a release from seeing.
油彩、畫布、黃陶、木板,2020
某天晚上我開著車在路上,當天因為和朋友聊了一整天古典樂的關係,我在車上聽著不同演奏家演奏同一首德布西的曲子,練習讓耳朵辨認曲子間的細膩差別。我以時速四十的速度緩慢前進,雙眼卻無法自主的被帶進兩排閃來閃去的LED招牌。印象派樂曲和人工照明的衝突感,我突然有一種進入科幻電影的錯覺。這樣的科幻感引起一股疲勞與恐懼:我們被注視著,被LED燈的閃光、被斗大的字體、被強烈的顏色注視著,我們被這樣過量的資訊和暴力的美感餵養,雙眼失神。
在城市裡面生活久了,你就什麼也看不到了,因為你會忘記怎麼看。你想像的山會是一種綠,想像的海只有一種藍。去年三月,我從泰國曼谷開了五個小時的車到北碧府,準備隔天去尋找一個位於北碧府的瀑布。抵達旅館的時候太陽已經準備開始下山,我拎著啤酒坐到河邊,河邊起了霧,所有的樹、河面、小船、跳水的人,都蒙上了一層稀釋過後的白色。太陽正下山時,白色的底部還會透出一些紫光、橘光、紅光。你曾經被一片風景擁抱得動彈不得過嗎?這就是那樣的經驗。起霧的河每一秒都在變化,每一秒都是未曾看過的樣子。那天我看著那個景看了一個多小時,直到夜幕低垂,只看得到黑。這是人類在大自然中時常找到的共鳴,讓感官能夠回到眼睛,讓感受時間的能力回到身體,連結到內心,觸碰到靈魂。
這次我向自己提問,作為一位創作者要如何保持感知的主導權?就像進入一片自然裡頭,那種無需費力就能夠把觀看帶回身體的經驗,逃離社會中所有關於教我們如何去看,那些視覺上的宰制。回到純粹的繪畫性與雕塑性中,在除了圖像、文字、顏色的訊息之外,從痕跡與痕跡之間交疊的關係產生的時間與空間去觀看,這個最終的觀看狀態同時也是個回溯拆解的起點,把觀看所經歷的每一個細節解散開來。