手帕(handkerchief), 2022
paper, cross-stitch, yarn, found objects, digital c-type prints, corrugated cardboard
dimensions variable
手帕 (handkerchief)¹ is a series of empirical walks detouring a handkerchief² I have. The handkerchief returned to me when a familiar photograph showed up with unfamiliar information I should have been familiar with. The unexpected discovery of a forgotten pair of pants saturated under the flash in the bottom half of the photo led me back to a handkerchief sewn from the same fabric, a hand-sewn square piece of cloth with pink checkerboards and teddy-bear patterns on it. Thus, the handkerchief that has been stored in a drawer for years reappears in the center of the swinging memory and time. It disturbed the orderly experience of time for an instant until the durational object itself has become the site where various spaces across time collapse into an indistinguishable one. Including words and materials alike, the work is an assemblage of processes, reweaving the handkerchief and translating the extensive duration condensed in the palm-size, unassuming object into imageries.
Words are materials of my mnemonic exercise of redescription. I trace the brightness and structures of the spaces internal and external to the handkerchief and objects around it until the writing itself becomes an autonomous process. And like how objects as coordinates of space and time are tied up to other coordinates one after another, I constantly get distracted when moving closer to the handkerchief, therefore, materials, voices, and objects that are foreign to the original history of the handkerchief take up the room. Appendixes and indexes branch off from the process itself when I circle around the handkerchief object. They are the results of unstable focal points. In front of me, the work accumulates into a thickened dialogue unverifiable from neither the past nor the present.
¹ (noun.)
1. A book. A stool. A cross-stitch instruction and a cross-stitch. A zipper head in the shape of a teddy bear. A door handle.
2. Two boxes.
3. Three wooden drawer handles.
5. Five photographs.
7. Seven appendixes.
² (noun.) A soft, square piece of cloth with pink and white checkerboards and teddy bear patterns.
