We always feel the need to solidify memories and moments, as if they will flow away or evaporate. We make them tangible and cage them in frames, boxes, and digital files. We are no longer satisfied by a drawing, a photograph. Video captures movement, as if the proof of motion makes it more real and alive. We don’t trust our innate abilities anymore. We don’t feel real without the extensions from technology, electronics, machinery- as if we don’t exist without being materialized.
The complexities and abilities of digital media, however, modifies the reality. We are now able to take control. We can construct and destruct. We can cut out time and space, rearrange, filter, connect/disconnect, assemblage, disrupt...We can be anyone and we can be anything. We create new realities. But then we feel lost. We don’t know which is more real - the actualities, the raw documentation or the reconstructions. There is this moment- a blink of time in life, when you feel like you are pulled out of time and space, stuck in a void full of confusion and disappointment. Sometimes we feel more authentic in the (consciously or unconsciously) altered realities - dreams, fictions, and fantasies. Sometimes, we just don’t want to be sober to face the actualities.
Our mental imagery of moments and memories is scattered and fragmentized, and it is our sensory perception and flow of mind that makes sense out of them. Our mechanical extensions, our physical body covered by objects of identification and statements, our anxiety of time-loss become hindrances.
We forget we are all creatures of water. It is what suffuses us when we first come into being and we keep coming back to it. Time is lost in water, it slows down, spreads through, and dissolves. It embeds timeless movement. Our body is free from the restrained reality when we submerge into water, into its illumination and hallucination. It becomes a gateway and an interface. We are naked, free and fluid. We admire, fear, struggle, play, come and go. Maybe it’s ok that memories and moments flow away and evaporate, because we are all going to be nonsolid one day.
Meistaranemar á fyrra ári í myndlist við Listaháskóla Íslands halda röð samsýninga á vorönn 2017. Sýningarnar eru af ólíkum toga en eiga það sammerkt að vera eins konar kveikjuþræðir og nánari útfærslur af hugmyndum og vinnuferli nemenda fram til þessa.
Sihan Yang er fædd í Kína og býr í Hong Kong og á Íslandi. Hún lauk BA gráðu í Myndlist í Honk Kong og leggur nú stundir á meistaranám í myndlist við Listaháskóla Íslands. Í list sinni vinnur hún með teikningar, málverk, video og hljóð innsetningar.
