Paper Cult, installation view
2024
analog photography
archival inkjet print
analog photography
archival inkjet print
Script (excerpt)
Repetition is the circulation.
Circulation is rhythm
Pause is an error.
Error is revolution.
Until all possibilities are exhausted,
the real photograph,
emerges.
......
I'm a blank sheet,
I have no table of contents or index,
no history and no future.
I move with the wind,
I manifest the invisible.
I go from light to night,
From night to light.
A piece of white paper is suspended right above my bed. Perceiving the laws of its rotation becomes my daily contemplation. Whether it ameliorates or deteriorates my insomnia remains unknown.
5:48 a.m. is the best time for this project, or any time I’m awake around the epilogue of darkness. An inkling of the sun leaks into the room, diffusing a sense of the blue. The symmetrical reflection from the mirror along with my screen’s glimmer neutralized what nature gives, then a perfect wall facing my bed, a pure gloom/bleakness in this shadowless territory.
My gaze starts as usual, the paper is rotating languidly in a random clockwise or counterclockwise direction, either gradually stopping halfway or even turning to the opposite. With the doors and windows unventilated, it swiftly rotates in a complete round again and again with excitement, as if constantly being exploratory and inquiry at the junction of life and death, as if blinking countless times to experience the impermanence, the story in the flow of the explicitness and implicitness.
Sometimes, I leave the window open, the howling wind rushes in, and the branches of the trees are nearly broken, yet the paper is deadly silent. What imperceptible air currents is this wind competing with? Stillness is thus created in the clamor. After the wind calms down, it starts to move again. How strange, so similar to myself. Except that, it never turns back and forth without pause. At a certain perpendicular moment, after slashing hard through the gloom with its glowing sharp edge, it completely disappears from my sight (the wall behind is grayish blue), it disappears on the way to reappearance, and then more than reaches the reappearance, but also crowned itself with glory unconcealed as it faced the window.
I am looking at it attentively without delirium, but it seems as if I have seen nothing, that nothing has happened. Then I glanced at my watch, it’s not like nothing had happened: time was wasted anyway. However, I felt I might have grasped the subtlety; if ‘infra-thin’ is a subtle separation, a distance, a gap or delay between two things, then conjuring my bedding doss into a quagmire, my sight of the paper ever moving towards pilgrimage when insomnia visits, is to make the intervening denseness infinitely magnification, deposition, compression into a dazzling infra-thick. A duration rotates, gradations of light and dark elapse and reappear on a continuous spectrum. I open my eyes, it is light alternating. When I close my eyes, it is time passing. Escape from the rhythm of story and stories, I sleep soundly in the shadowless in-between.