Mirror of Words
“Books are my companions when I am alone, my teachers when I am at sea. They are my past, present, and future, they are the languages I am taught to be; they send me away from home, and lead me back towards home. When life goes on and on without an end, books are the evidence of my dwelling place.”— 2019/01
In the space there is a road of light. The performer stands, her traditional long grey cheongsam and neat long braids symbolizing her literacy and her culture. Facing way from the audience, she slowly braids her hair into a bun with a zan (簪); the ritual suggests the growth of a woman. The books, different books in various languages from different times and areas are the bricks that make up the path. The performer does not speak; a soundtrack plays her narration, as if a story retold from memory. She moves and steps quietly on the road of books, picking them up and turning the pages with different poses that silently suggests her emotions within the journey, some of which resonate with traditional artworks, such as Michelangelo’s Erythraean Sibyl, Ingre’s La Source, and Rodin’s The Thinker. Train and plane tracks, as well as real-life recordings, glide through as she walks down the aisle. Readings in both English and Chinese constitute the main text of the soundtrack; composed with quotations from the books in the space. She turns the pages of the last book on the road of light. Looking back, she gently sits; as the light fades, a mandarin Chinese text continues until darkness absorbs the space.
photo credit Vera Yun-ju Lee
photo credit Vera Yun-ju Lee
About
What is home? Where is home? Is home a physical place, a familiar face, a sense of collectiveness, or a fluid changeable concept? What triggers the change? What is the unchangeable beneath the change?
The scenography biography piece Mirror of Words is dedicated to my mother. Originally written as a short story in 2018 May, Mirror of Words was driven by the incident in life where I found no words in the deep sadness staying with my mother at the hospital, who have just finished her tumor surgery. I swiped open my kindle and was occasionally touched by Neil Gaiman’s poem “The Instruction,” where he wrote in metaphors about a child’s journey through the garden door and returned home with courage and wisdom. Tranquility, melancholy, and numbness sensing from the piece are the feelings of my year-long journey leaving home. My mother later died on August 9, 2019, leaving me a closet of her favourite clothes and three boxes of books to live by, as my ongoing grief totalizes the year-long journey.
Books received from different time and area along the path of my growth composes the storyline as an Odysseus' cycle. The earliest copy is Chian Chen’s Water Asks (簡媜《水問》), given by my Junior high school Chinese teacher at the age of thirteen. Sanmao’s Gone with the Rainy Season (三毛《雨季不再來》), Eileen Chang’s translation of The Old Man and the Sea (《老人與海》), and a copy of El Alquismista are given by my mother as a high school student. Too Loud a Solitude and One Hundred Years of Solitude are borrowed from friends, and A Diary to You as well as Surprised by Joy are received as graduation gifts from a college friend. Whereas The Little Prince, The Graveyard Book, Alice in Wonderland, and The Neverending Story are collections of personal interest, Virgil’s Georgics and Dante’s Inferno are learned from school.
The fictions, memoirs, and travel diaries are hardly similar from each other besides that they are all about “journeys” connected to my own journey in time, yet as symbolic materials they speak to each other when I rearrange the books in different sequences. The soundtrack is a combination of environmental sounds, voice recordings, and readings. Some recordings from the soundtrack are closely connected to my personal experience, as it includes my mother's own voice in the beginning of the soundtrack, and a teacher's voice near the end.
The scenography biography piece Mirror of Words is dedicated to my mother. Originally written as a short story in 2018 May, Mirror of Words was driven by the incident in life where I found no words in the deep sadness staying with my mother at the hospital, who have just finished her tumor surgery. I swiped open my kindle and was occasionally touched by Neil Gaiman’s poem “The Instruction,” where he wrote in metaphors about a child’s journey through the garden door and returned home with courage and wisdom. Tranquility, melancholy, and numbness sensing from the piece are the feelings of my year-long journey leaving home. My mother later died on August 9, 2019, leaving me a closet of her favourite clothes and three boxes of books to live by, as my ongoing grief totalizes the year-long journey.
Books received from different time and area along the path of my growth composes the storyline as an Odysseus' cycle. The earliest copy is Chian Chen’s Water Asks (簡媜《水問》), given by my Junior high school Chinese teacher at the age of thirteen. Sanmao’s Gone with the Rainy Season (三毛《雨季不再來》), Eileen Chang’s translation of The Old Man and the Sea (《老人與海》), and a copy of El Alquismista are given by my mother as a high school student. Too Loud a Solitude and One Hundred Years of Solitude are borrowed from friends, and A Diary to You as well as Surprised by Joy are received as graduation gifts from a college friend. Whereas The Little Prince, The Graveyard Book, Alice in Wonderland, and The Neverending Story are collections of personal interest, Virgil’s Georgics and Dante’s Inferno are learned from school.
The fictions, memoirs, and travel diaries are hardly similar from each other besides that they are all about “journeys” connected to my own journey in time, yet as symbolic materials they speak to each other when I rearrange the books in different sequences. The soundtrack is a combination of environmental sounds, voice recordings, and readings. Some recordings from the soundtrack are closely connected to my personal experience, as it includes my mother's own voice in the beginning of the soundtrack, and a teacher's voice near the end.