| Summary: | 碩士 === 實踐大學 === 媒體傳達設計學系碩士在職專班 === 107 === This is a close observation on fear, fear of the author as an individual, fear as seen through the subject matter of ‘The Cage’, ‘The Passing of Time’, ‘Oblivion’, fear as intimately transformed into a creation of life. This is how I have lived, I had drawn these lines with my hand, as my life had been drawn through time. This is how I choose to coexist with time, I willed it as linear as the lines I’d drawn. Pushing into the future, these lines mark the beginning to everything, they mark proof to that I had chosen to live, the mark of a creator.
‘We all endure death’s closing footsteps in life.’ If I had learned anything from the loss of someone dear, that would be it. As time marches on, we too march much closer to our own ends. As Erich Fromm, one of the greatest contemporaries in psychoanalysis, described in ‘The Sane Society’: “When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past, and about the future as far as it is death—which actually is return to the past, the inorganic state of matter.”
I have closely observed and compared great artworks with identical subjects, of those creations dealing with fear of diminishing life, personal chronicles transcribed with care throughout the flow of time. Yayoi Kusama, who drew inspiration from fear, On Kawara who detailed 50 years of passing life through painful dedication, and Taiwanese performance artist Teh-Ching Hsieh who channeled the meanings of life through his work. These creations that bear the life-blood eternal of the artists themselves, are archived in Chapter 2 – Related Artworks.
Much similarity can be seen between the passing of time and the aesthetics of linear painting. Only when a line ends can another begin to be born, just as one second cannot come before the other, it is through this sequential order that I choose to manifest my works, and through them, the linear seconds in this life of mine. Each line becomes a work in itself once my hand had departed, through every line I experience a crossing of life and death, of ending and beginning. This unending circle that my works share with the human life, in which one second dies the moment another is born.
Time sequences, while broken, can form complete life stories. Just as daily trifles break our thoughts apart, determined actions too can be interrupted by the most trivial matters in life. These collected works are those pieces of my life. While unfortunate to have been shattered, form a gestalt consciousness of life along this stream of time.
If I’d seen the worst that life may offer, what is it I should fear of the future, of life itself? As the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche had once exclaimed: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” It had occurred to me that should fear continue to cage our lives, our persistence in creating further works, our struggles of the heart towards freedom, would equal to forging keys to our own imprisonment. As time marches on towards tomorrow, it is my choice to accompany it. This is how I choose to coexist with time.
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