How can art reshape the experience of loneliness through the strategies of absurdity?

Loneliness is always like a ball of string wrapped around me. As time goes on, This feeling is getting stronger and stronger. The threads surround me so tightly that I couldn’t move or even breathe.  Gasping for breath through artistic creation, art became my main tool for survival. In an attempt to visualize loneliness through my working process, I eventually created a new language for myself. While I have become quite a sensitive and vulnerable individual since then, I have simultaneously been able to rely on this language to transmute personal, complex emotions into an effective visual art practice. 

From my perspective, art creation is a unique system without strict mechanisms,—a system which does not impose norms to artists. In this way, it is free and it can be either direct or implicit to many people. The process of art making can be surprising, unreasonable, and absurd. Absurdity in particular allows me to express pain and depression euphemistically and humorously within my work. My projects  will look at loneliness through the lens of absurdity in art creation, discussing the ways that art can reshape existential pain through a strategic use of absurdity. Causes of modern isolation will additionally be examined, ultimately investigating how loneliness is a state of being that relates explicitly to contemporary living; a mode of living where technology increasingly replaces human contact.                                                                                                                                             

Charging 2020-2021

In my photography and performance art series Charging, I  examine and discuss the relationship between loneliness and digital media. I combine the human body, exaggerated movements, electronic products, public space, and nature in the first part of this piece.

Sharing The Pizza

In my work Sharing the Pizza, I  used a rope to bind another participant and myself. In this social experiment, we sat face to face, eating pizza together in the same space. However, instead of communicating directly, we only allowed ourselves interaction through a computer camera.  Even if we both ate the same piece of pizza, we had to share the taste of this very pizza through the camera. Whenever we hung up our video calls, we were to go back and proceed with our regular screen and internet use. The rope proves that the participants are close in physical space. However, even if they are physically close, it does not mean that they do not feel alone. Through Sharing the Pizza, it is my hope that the viewer can realize how humans today are much too immersed in electronic devices and social media. If we continue to ignore physical interaction in this way, we will inevitably lose our collective sense of intimacy and become eternally lonely.

The Daily Life of a Doll

The strategic use of absurdity within The daily Life of a Doll can be exemplified through my choice of subject— a lifeless rubber head.  In this documented performance, I set up an Instagram account and Tinder account for the doll head in order to expand its social network. In addition, I allowed my subject to watch the news and even make video calls with more than 30 strangers online. In an interesting turn of events, most of the netizens ended up interacting with this head without knowing or questioning its real identity. I found this result and phenomenon itself to be quite ridiculous. This experiment revealed how easy and quick it was to create a fictitious persona on the Internet, even with just a doll head. At the same time, when I logged her out of all her social media accounts, in the end, this head seemed to have never existed. All of her newfound connections disappeared immediately.

My epidemic diary

In my photography series, My Epidemic Diary, I record my solitary daily life in a nine-square-meter room during the first phase of the COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. The absurdity of this work can be seen in that fact that although the objects around me do not respond, I still use my body to make exaggerated movements in a desperate attempt to interact with my grim surroundings. 

I'm Not a Murderer

The inspiration for the following work, I’m Not a Murderer, is based on my experience of being discriminated against while studying abroad. This is a piece of endurance art that involved me continuously repeating in a closed space that “I am not a murderer” until I felt I could no longer continue, my body and mind eventually breaking down.