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
Audio |
Performance
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In the space, there is a road of light. The performer stands, her traditional long grey cheongsam and neat long braids symbolising her literacy and her culture. Facing away 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 places—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 suggest her emotions within the journey, some of which resonate with traditional artworks, such as Michelangelo’s Erythraean Sibyl, Ingres’ 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 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 May 2018, Mirror of Words was driven by the incident in my life when I found no words in the deep sadness of staying with my mother at the hospital, who had just finished her tumour 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 returning home with courage and wisdom. Tranquillity, melancholy, and numbness sensed 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 totalised the year-long journey.
Books received from different times and areas along the path of my growth compose the storyline as an Odysseus-like 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 Alquimista were given by my mother when I was a high school student. Too Loud a Solitude and One Hundred Years of Solitude were borrowed from friends, and A Diary to You as well as Surprised by Joy were received as graduation gifts from a college friend. Meanwhile, The Little Prince, The Graveyard Book, Alice in Wonderland, and The Neverending Story are collections of personal interest, while Virgil’s Georgics and Dante’s Inferno were learned from school.
The fictions, memoirs, and travel diaries are hardly similar to each other, aside from the fact 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 at the beginning 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 May 2018, Mirror of Words was driven by the incident in my life when I found no words in the deep sadness of staying with my mother at the hospital, who had just finished her tumour 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 returning home with courage and wisdom. Tranquillity, melancholy, and numbness sensed 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 totalised the year-long journey.
Books received from different times and areas along the path of my growth compose the storyline as an Odysseus-like 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 Alquimista were given by my mother when I was a high school student. Too Loud a Solitude and One Hundred Years of Solitude were borrowed from friends, and A Diary to You as well as Surprised by Joy were received as graduation gifts from a college friend. Meanwhile, The Little Prince, The Graveyard Book, Alice in Wonderland, and The Neverending Story are collections of personal interest, while Virgil’s Georgics and Dante’s Inferno were learned from school.
The fictions, memoirs, and travel diaries are hardly similar to each other, aside from the fact 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 at the beginning and a teacher's voice near the end.
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