EXHIBITION
忻慧姸：《在不太遙遠的很久以前》
Yan Wai Yin: Too Long Ago, Not Far
16.9 – 8.10.2023
無論身處何方，只要見到有鳥飛過，我都會感到安全。《在不太遙遠的很久以前》徘徊於幾種遠距離、拋物線與迴音之間，形容一段時間內事情重覆發生，記憶不斷交錯連繫，一再編寫，和遺忘的壓縮狀態。 承接前作，運用鎖碎的日常記錄構建出一個個時空洞，是次展出繼續以各種成像工具延長一節節熟悉的時刻，透過拼貼重組與語言發聲，呼喊道別。
Floating Projects | 據點。 句點
JCCAC L3-06D (Tuesday – Sunday 2 – 8pm, Closed on Mondays)
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1
有天L在辦公室問起一條物理問題，究竟在山上或是河流邊的時間過渡得比較快。我猜是山上。
2
2018年3月17日
她的家是啡黃色的，比燈光烤過的報紙，帶鐵鏽的煤油爐，還有擠滿陳舊電器的窄房間。她說什麼壞了爛了不見了都不會再買了。今天經常拍她的肩，扶住她的手臂，看得見骨頭的形狀。記得這幾年偶然都會被問起有沒有寫日記的習慣，上一篇已是七年前的事了，這陣子什麼特別也沒發生。
3
某日零晨，我收到一個陌生人的短訊，想待到明天下午才回覆吧。日出，日落，我把她問起的資料逐一貼上，直到晚上問起友人C才知道原來我們早幾日見過面，那天我還在放映中途問她要不要食在袋中翻出來一排半溶了的明治朱古力，之後她請我食了一件朱古力蛋糕。大概還有兩年，她就會見到我傳過去的訊息了。
4
我不太記起，為甚麼會想要跳進這個洞。《在不太遙遠的很久以前》指向一種壓縮狀態，形容在一段時間内發生的多件事情後的各種邊界模糊。時間或長或短，相類似的事件或甚不斷重疊，變形，擴散，導致特定時序與其內容變得空洞，猶如在很久以前發生（主觀感覺），即使事實卻不過只相隔了幾天（實際時間）。
日子A－早上：起床－考試；中午：探望朋友；晚上：看電影；睡覺。
日子B－早上：起床－上班寫文章；中午：與同事散步；晚上：看手機；睡覺。
我所在意的是記錄過程中所牽涉的歸類和分隔所呈現的狀態(condition)或者模式(pattern)。那些並非能以邏輯或三言兩語釐清，反而比較是某種習慣與約定俗成的反映。屬於不同時間點與場合的食物，從陌生人，變成同事，朋友的過渡階段，以及那些更加微少的裂縫，例如一種擺位，或者氣味。小時候樂理老師叫音符做「豆豉」，我把這些景象視為一種記號(notation)，也正因為一直依賴著這些實體作為定位，把一組陳設連繫到另一組，把一個網絡認知為社區，城市，家，再在前面加上「我的」，「我們的」。這是狗，是動物，也可以叫牠 「大嚿」(是鄰居小狗的暱稱)，位於我家的附近，每天早上八時和晚上十時左右需要外出散步，各種各種，肖像逐漸越變立體。記住一個名字是建立關係的一種。直到路邊不再常有怕醜草，公園長凳加上扶手間隔，斑鳩轉了個聚集的地方，我開始懷疑，迷失，支支吾吾，「我還喜歡這裏嗎？」，不斷在一個空間想起另一個如模板般相似的空間。或許正正是這些事物一直如此理所當然卻又無聲無息般存在，一旦變了味，即使混身不對勁，亦深明其微不足道會隨著時間慢慢習慣，勉強接受，然後逐漸遺忘。
正當我第一次拿起這部超8攝錄機的時候，我已知道自己正準備離開。A說我像一個吃力地向前跑，卻又不斷拉扯著過去的人。承接前作《局部失明》模仿視覺測試，《在不太遙遠的很久以前》以英語教科書《華英通語》記錄著我想重複翻看的一事一物，猶如打開生存模式中口袋裏的一本應急手冊般記住。《華英通語》為華人最早的英語教科書，書中以粵語標音學習各種英語單詞的發音，偶有收錄日常應用的簡短句子，供需要與外國人接觸洽商的華人使用。這個模式對我而言或許是一場反擊，回應前作經常被問起對白中的語言選擇，以及種種粗暴概括城市為霓虹燈之都的敘事，我迷戀這些會被老師謾罵歸類為漫無目的的空鏡頭，我認為自己的存在與他們無異。
人文地理學家 Tim Cresswell在《地方》一書提及特領族印第安人因著生活所需，按照他們的移動為海洋起了繁多的名字，相反周邊的陸地卻如隱形般被完全忽略，是個「缺乏意義的領域」。作品中的詞語與其翻譯由數個版本的《華英通語》集合而成，與其說是要以「字典」定義一個城市的模樣，反過來應該說成是以我這一個百無聊賴的遊蕩者(flâneur)的身份與視覺，透過不斷重複的路徑觀看，嘗試以四周的事物理解教科書的含義。腳下的貝殼，爸爸的後腦，街巷盡頭的手推車都是以差不多的尺寸透過觀景器(viewfinder)在我的右眼呈現。這裡拍的都像一面肖像，而非風景。
作品記錄著城市中不同的循環(loop)，家中盆栽的花開花落，不同社區的施工與拆卸現場，賽馬不斷奔跑，鳥兒飛來又飛去。割(cut)與貓(cat)在不同版本下的《華英通語》亦會以「咳」發聲，廣東話聲調與其文字形態的複雜，城市中人來人往的喧鬧擠湧與物件零落混亂四散在城市之間，即使偶爾感到呼吸困難與無盡的壓迫感，但這亦正正是近乎扭曲的愛般著地親切之處，就如在回程候機室聽到阿嬤在說髒話般爽快中帶點溫暖一樣。
這個作品將會於我到達另一個地方，收到最後一箱沖洗好的菲林後結束。我還記得每每用菲林拍攝的時候，總會被問起「這樣會不會太浪費菲林了？」與其問使用菲林是否一種情懷，我想在這裏用菲林的原因，正因為我確切想要煞有介事般保存這些零碎的回憶，或者更準確的說，超8讓我更在意當下的凝視。每一個瞬間猶如一次眨眼，短暫卻與記錄的清晰度無關。正因為使用菲林，按下快門的緊張，等待沖曬店的回信，以及各種低級錯誤導致影像過度曝光等等，因為這件機材和這件作品，我不斷經歷又再次提醒著有關這個地方的種種。
有一陣子不太相熟的人常常在幾句虛寒問暖後，會突然對我說著「再慢一點，你就落後了。」在落後什麼，要往哪裏跑，我無從得知。或許在那些落後的日子中我正在愉快地與三百隻小狗狂歡，創作也拋得遠遠的，也或許我正在惆悵及過度思考著不可控的未來，沉溺在各種可以發生的惡夢。
無論如何，我已逐漸習慣了以這些方法逃離。
5
那天下著雨，拍完手一直在抖，跟遠方的A 嚷著一大堆adrenaline rush的廢話 —- 想記住這瞬間與之前之後的所有零零碎碎無關 。
6
“…time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” – Jean-Paul Sartre “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner”
J 曾經板著面問我，有沒有曾經想過為何我的作品環繞疾病，包括《局部失明》，或者《迴帶》。我說沒有，理論上疾病確實看似一種煩擾的缺失，但同樣是一種狀態，正如自身一度躺在床上個多月，每天醒來都看得見太陽又將一層薄紗蓋在身上的無力感，日復日的模糊，現在偶然背骨還是會提醒自己這段日子。就如年多後利用作品殺時間的我，或與患有嚴重口吃的同事相處，為此我並沒有任何一刻對這些情景感到不耐煩。作家宋惠慈(Wai Chee Dimock)曾指出福克納(Faulkner)作品《喧嘩與騷動》(Sound and Fury)筆下中的Benjy 儘管廣泛定義為一種白痴(idiocy)或智能障礙(mental retardation)，但這角色的設定並非一種缺失(deficiency)的呈現，按福克納所指，孩童的純潔存在著某種以自我為中心(self-centeredness)與白痴，但亦正因著其身份可以要求社會的憐憫與愛護，敘事以Benjy 一種近乎極端盲目的純真(innocence)放大對親妹妹Caddy的貞潔身份定型，伸延以該角度揭示與世界所產生的種種衝突與矛盾。
7
「沒有時差，我什麼都不是。」在德國的一個月裏，我不斷想起這句話。我差點忘記了《在不太遙遠的很久以前》的起點是在一次等候巴士的時候，看見一個男子在不斷拍打周遭的物件，用雨傘敲打磚頭，用手拍打車站路牌，甚至跑上前拍打正在離開的巴士。那種危險的行徑或許是他與周遭建立連繫的方法，就是如此直接地一直走一直拍打。於我則是透過不斷把所看見的影像以各種方式拉長，聽說透過連繫不同記憶點或者重新建立定義，就可以加固特定的記憶。圓桌討論中Timo說起他一直對於如何處理隱喻存疑，如何平衡作品的拉扯，或者是否需要在國際性的場域下在藝術家自述中表明一切脈絡。儘管我一直在他的作品裏徘徊觀看，也並沒有因著喜愛而要像解謎般地要去把整個作品脈絡釐清，Leckey說起他喜歡一些使自己變得愚笨的創作，可能種種不明不白，愚笨或者模糊，可以揭開更多空間。
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節錄：
我所期待的，其實就是三個層面的老化痕跡：關於地點本身的老化，關於我的回憶的老化，以及關於我的書寫的老化。
喬治．培瑞克 (Georges Perec)，《空間物種》，頁90。
一名法國俘虜在大半夜裏從準備將他載往德國的火車上成功脫逃。漆黑的夜裏伸手不見五指。俘虜完全不知道自己身在何方。他走了很久，隨便亂走，也就是一直往前走。到了某個時刻，他來到了水邊。一陣汽笛鳴響。幾秒鐘後，船前行推進的波浪輕拍岸邊。俘虜從汽笛鳴響直到波浪拍打聲的時間距離，推算出河的寬度；知道了寬度，他就能認定是那條河(那是萊茵河)；認出河來，他也曉得自己在哪裏了。
喬治．培瑞克 (Georges Perec)，《空間物種》，頁141。
語言（例如英文）清楚提供了字彙和文法的結構。過份偏離這些規則，我們說的話就沒有意義。即時如此，語言的使用並不完全是規則的產物。人類以不同方式使用語言。有時候，這些用法不會遵守規則。如果這種情形經常發生，語言結構本身就會開始改變。
Tim Cresswell (著) 王志弘, 徐苔玲 (譯)，《地方》，頁60。
當某件事或某個人被判定為「不得其所」，他們就是有所逾越(transgression)。逾越就是指「越界」。不像「偏差」的社會學定義，逾越本然是個空間概念。逾越這條界線通常是一條地理界線，也是一條社會與文化的界線。
Tim Cresswell (著) 王志弘, 徐苔玲 (譯)，《地方》，頁164。
Naming is power — the creative power to call something into being, to render the invisible visible, to impart a certain character to things.
Tuan Yi-Fu, Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach, pp688.
How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.
Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, back cover.
我睡得極沉極沉，彷彿被施咒，有生以來第一次睡得那樣沉，沒有作夢，沒有聽見父親進門的聲音。好像走過了極長極長的距離，我才來到她的面前，看她把手按在我的頭上，對我笑著：好像我並不知道自己有朝一日終將明白：「將來」是何等玄虛的字眼；倘若真心想要摧毀什麼，只要一點點時間，和極短極短的距離。
童偉格，《西北雨》，頁202。
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(ENG)
EXHIBITION
Yan Wai Yin: Too Long Ago, Not Far
16.9 – 8.10.2023
No matter where I am, I feel secured as long as I see birds fly by. In Too Long Ago Not Far, I loiter in contrastive distances between points, parabolas, and echoes, to describe things that repeat within a certain period. Memory has never stopped to (re)write over or cross-link the compressive states of oblivion. Undertaking Yan’s ongoing practice of constructing a spatial-temporal void from loose diaries, the exhibition continues with various ways of deploying image-making tools to extend sessions of familiar moments, thus her way of bidding farewell through collaging, reconstructing, and speech renunciation.
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1
The other day L raised a physics question in the office. “Does time transit faster up the mountain or by the river?” she asked. I guess it’s the mountain.
2
March 17, 2018
Her home is casted with shades of burnt yellow ochre: aged newspapers baked by the lights, a rusty kerosene stove, and a cubicle cramped with old appliances. She said she stops buying anything even if something is broken or gone. I often pat her shoulders these days. Her arms are so thin the shape of her bones is visible. In the past, I was asked occasionally about my habit of keeping a diary. I just realized the last entry was already seven years ago, and nothing special happened these days.
3
One midnight, I received a text message from a stranger. I waited until the following afternoon to respond. Sunrise and sunset, I copy-pasted everything she asked about one by one. It wasn’t until I asked friend C in the evening that I realized the stranger was a friend I made a few days earlier. That day, I asked her during the screening if she wanted a piece of the half-melted Meiji chocolate I pulled out from my bag. She treated me to a piece of chocolate cake afterward. In about two years, she will see the message I sent.
4
I have forgotten why I wanted to jump into this hole. Too Long Ago, Not Far refers to a state of compression, which describes the different kinds of blurred boundaries between the many things that happen within the same period and their consequences. Be it a long time or just a brief moment, similar or analogical events repeat and superimpose, morphing, dispersing, and emptying the content of a specific temporal order, as if that event happened a long time ago (subjectively speaking), even though it is just a few days ago (actual time).
Day A – morning: waking up – taking an exam; noon: visiting friends; evening: watching films; sleeping.
Day B – morning: waking up – going to work and writing; noon: strolling with colleagues; evening: looking at my mobile phone; sleeping.
I care about the pattern and conditions of classification and separation involved in the recording process. There are things that can never be clarified by logic or in a few words, as they are just tokens of habits and conventions. Foods that belong to different points of time and occasions, strangers turned colleagues, the transitional phases of friendship, including the fine cracks caused by, say, different posturings or auras. When I was young, my music theory teacher would call notes “tempeh” (fermented soybean). To me, notes as notations are visual objects, a concrete assignment I depend on to grasp my position – to connect one group of display with another, to understand a network to be a community, city, or home, and to add “my” or “our” before these nouns. This is a dog, or this is an animal, or I could also call it “Biggie” (that’s the nickname of my neighbor’s little dog); Biggie lives nearby, and needs to be walked around 8:00 am and 10:00 pm every day. So on, so on, and so forth. Flat portraits gradually grow three-dimensional. Remember: naming is a way to establish a relationship. Until there is no more mimosa on the roadside, park benches are separated by handrails, and the cushats change their gathering place, I would always be in doubt, feel lost, and hesitate. Do I still like it here? In every place, we would remind of another similar space or the template of its likeness. Perhaps we have always taken for granted that things exist as they appear. So, one day, if their aura changes, and even if something is wrong, we would slowly get used to them overtime, acknowledging the insignificance and, reluctant or not, we let go and forget.
When I first took up this Super 8 camera, I knew I was about to leave. A said that I was like a person who is running forward with great difficulty, but is constantly being pulled along. Following up on the imitation visual test in my previous work Localized Blindness, this current event, Too Long Ago, Not Far, alludes to the English textbook “Huaying Tongyu” mode to record everything I want to read over and over again, just like opening an emergency manual in my pocket in survival mode. Huaying Tongyu [《華英通語》, literally, interchangeable expressions between Chinese and English, first published in 1867 in New York] is the earliest English textbook for Chinese people. The book uses Cantonese phonetic notation to teach the pronunciation of English words. It occasionally includes short sentences for daily use, to convenience Chinese users who need to contact and negotiate with foreigners. This mode offers me the base for a kind of counterattack, from which I derive my response to the many questions posed to me about my previous art games: I was often asked about my choice of language in the dialogue, and various narratives that crudely summarized the city as a neon city. I was obsessed with these things that would be reviled by teachers as aimless. Empty lens, I think my existence is no different from theirs.
In his book Place: an Introduction, human geographer Tim Cresswell cites writings on the Tlingits (Indians in Juneau) – how, due to their daily needs, the territory Indians gave the ocean many names according to their movements. On the contrary, the surrounding land was completely ignored as if invisible, and it was “a realm without meaning,” or simply “a fact of life” only (p. 10) Accordingly, in my solo, words, phrases, and their translations are compiled from several editions of Chinese and English Phrasebook, with Chinese Pronunciation Indicated in English (huaying tongyu《華英通語》). A city and its looks, rather than being defined by a “dictionary,” should instead be said to be based on a bored flâneur – my identity and vision — who looks repeatedly by different paths, making attempts to understand textbook meanings against things around her. The shells under my feet, the back of my father’s head, and the cart at the end of the street are all presented in similar sizes and measures through the viewfinder. Everything taken here looks like a portrait, not a landscape.
My works record different kinds of loops in our city. The blossoming and withering of plotted flowers at home. Renovation and demolition in different districts and communities. The never-ending horse races. Birds flying in and out. The marked pronunciation in the Chinese and English Phrase Book conjoins “cut” and “cat” with the same utterance. The complexity of Cantonese sounds and other linguistic forms. The hustle and bustle of people coming and going in the city. The chaos of objects scattered across the city. Even if I occasionally find overwhelming pressure and difficulty in breathing, in the very same moments lie the intimacy out of almost twisted love – the same warmth I feel when hearing my grandma using dirty words in the lounge waiting for our return flight.
The day this solo event ends, I shall have already gone to a different place and received the final box of developed film. I remember that every time I toy with celluloid film, I would be asked, “Wouldn’t this be a little waste of film?” Instead of answering whether using film is a matter of personal sentiment, I assert that my reason for using film is precisely because I want to make it an event about preserving my fragmented memories, or, to be more precise, Super 8 makes me care more about the very act of a gaze. Each moment is like an eye’s blink, brief but indifferent to the clarity of the record. When using film, the care of pressing the shutter, waiting for a reply from the photo studio, and the various low-level mistakes that could lead to overexposed images and so on, constantly remind me of the richness of the place my camera captures, just as my work is also the work of a machine.
For a while, people I didn’t know very well would often say to me out of the blue, “If you slow down a little bit, you will fall behind.” I had no way of knowing what I was falling behind or where I was going. Maybe in those so-called backward days, I was happily partying with three hundred puppies and leaving my creation far away. Or perhaps I was in a kind of melancholy and overthinking the uncontrollable future, and therefore indulging in nightmares about all kinds of things that could happen.
No matter what, I have gradually grown used to escaping like I just described in the above.
5
That day, it was raining. My hands were shaking when shooting finished. I was screaming a whole bunch of bullshit out of my adrenaline rush to A who was far away. I want to remember that moment and the loose irrelevant fragments before and after.
6
“…time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” – Jean-Paul Sartre “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner”
J once asked me, with a blank expression on his face, whether I had asked why my works were often about illness, such as video Localized Blindness and screenprints Stammers. I said I never thought much about it. Theoretically speaking, the illness looks like a form of irritating defects, and yet it is a state of being, just like I had once laid in bed for over a month, overwhelmed by the helplessness of waking up every morning just to watch the sun placing another thin sheet on my body. And days as such went on and on numbing my senses. Even now, occasionally, my spinal chord would return to me the sensation of those bedridden days. Then many years passed, and I found myself killing time via artistic creation, or I happened to have to get along with a co-worker who stammers. Not a single time have I felt annoyed. Writer Wai Chee Dimock once pointed out that the character Benjy in William Fulkner’s Sound and Fury, though broadly agreed to be defined by idiocy or mental retardation, is not represented as someone with a deficiency. In fact, according to Faulkner, there is a certain self-centeredness and idiocy in the purity of children, but it is precisely because of their status of infancy that they can demand compassion and love from society. Faulkner’s narrative uses Benjy’s almost extremely blind innocence to magnify the stereotype of the chaste identity of the younger sister Caddy, and he extends this perspective to reveal the various conflicts and contradictions within the world.
7
“Without time difference, I am nothing.” I kept thinking of this sentence during the month I spent in Germany this past summer. I almost failed to remember that the starting point of Too Long Ago, Not Far was when I saw a man tapping on every object around him while I was waiting for the bus. He was tapping the bricks with his umbrella and slapping the station sign with his hands. He even ran up to a departing bus to smack it in the air. That is his way of establishing a connection with the surroundings, just walking and tapping directly, even if it seems dangerous to others. My way of establishing my relationship is by constantly elongating things encountered as images; and I have heard that by connecting different memory points, we establish new meanings and thus strengthen our memories. During a roundtable discussion, Timo expressed his doubts about the use of metaphors, and how to balance the different pulls of the work, or whether it is necessary, especially in an international art platform, to express the full contexts of work in the artist’s statement. I have spent much time “loitering” through his works, but not a single time have I wanted to exhaust the background of his making like working out a puzzle book, no matter how much I like his works. Leckey said that he likes some creations that make him stupid. There is much in what he said: for various reasons, what seems stupid or vague often reveals something.
(Original in Chinese. English translation by Dr. Linda C.H. Lai.)
