Portfolio
magnetic tape, acrylica panel. wood panel, glue, hair, dust, oil, and air
Things happen only once, but there can be many interpretations about the same event. I have been interested in how history that we know shaped its form. Time is an essential element in the process of history coming into being. The contour of fact changes its shape with time, just as wine changes its flavor over time. Time might deform facts because time gives the possibility to legendarize and mystify facts.
The relationship between what actually happened and written history is similar to the relationship between an artwork and the audience interpretation. Different audiences make different interpretations in front of the same artwork. These audiences, including art historians, curators, journalists, critics, and even artists themselves write and say their own different opinions about the same artwork.
In my work, this relationship between artwork and audience, and between representation and perception has always been important. Broadly speaking, there are two distinct types of images that are created from an artwork: one is the visual image that is recognized by the retina, and the other is the mental image of the audience, which has interpreted the initial retinal image. I have explored three kinds of representations in my work. First, there is the representation within the magnetic tape that holds its unique information. For example, The Picture of Dorian Gray (2008) contains audio information, a reading of Oscar Wild’s novel. Second, the visual appearance of this audio reading as magnetic tape creates a conventional visual image on the surface of my work, which can be described as thin horizontal lines that produce a dark brown shiny surface. Finally, there is the interpreted image that becomes each individual viewer’s own mental image. As visual representations, my magnetic tape pieces all appear similar, with only size and shape to distinguish them. The inner contents are never the same, however, due to the different recordings that are captured within the magnetic tapes. The contents in the magnetic tapes record an event or performance that actually happened, such as the actual reading of a particular novel, but these contents cannot be experienced by the audience directly. This indirect aspect of my artwork thus invites the audience to come up with a mental image on their own, and to reconsider the nature of looking more generally.
