With the exception of one fateful date, the four other exercises that I designed for Visual Diary Archive were each put together with a specific person in mind. I don’t speak to any of them so often anymore, and with distances, it sometimes becomes difficult to know where and how to begin again. Words don’t always bridge gaps, and perhaps neither do images, but if a series of exercises incite certain actions, I wonder what new thoughts, imaginations or understandings may be filled in the spaces between us.
The other quandary or surprise this brings us is the question of participation. It was because of a lack of general participation that I decided to ask a single person to respond to the exercises for me, and since each exercise had also been addressed to a singularity, it somehow made sense for this text-based response to be as well. So this is for Boat——less far, but also some distance away. I thought we would be connected by the expanse of sea next to our cities, but after checking the map I realised that the water where you are has a different name than the water where I am, even if water is fluid and I don’t want to believe it has bounds.
…
Nina and Asako made a work together in 2014 called The soup of a body past: notes on evaporation. Here is an image of the text that was printed and hung in the space:
And so I think now, along with Fotini and pictures of words, of the similarity between water and thoughts flowing between us, like ancient salts that both wound and heal us over time. Do you know the English idiom about rubbing salt into someone’s wounds? It means to make a bad situation worse, to aggravate it.
When we talked recently about togetherness, about how to participate in a project about being together, it felt almost like salt, like our non-togetherness being amplified by discussing it, and after that long back-and-forth of messages, I cried, alone. It felt bad, but maybe like the tolerance for salt, alcohol, and drugs, resilience grows with experience, so I really cannot say it was an overly aggravated situation. Unlike the connoisseur, after all this time I would prefer to make less judgements about who and what are wrong or right or bad or good. But maybe we can keep searching for new words or images or thoughts to simply keep describing the taste of these things. Like the quandary or surprise of your participation, I want to meet something outside of myself and get to know it better.
What I mean is, if it was a less than ideal situation that hardly a soul volunteered their images or words to this project, maybe it was kind of salty to finally see your contributions——several being what I saw as misunderstandings of the instructions. I think anyone who has asked anything of anyone else will know this taste. Let’s call it the strange flavour of ‘participation’ or ‘getting others to do things’, together or not. Sometimes it comes in the form of ‘collaboration’ (what Eyal Weizman calls the ‘very absolute extreme’ of participation), sometimes ‘coercion’ (what parents sometimes have to do to get their children’s compliance), and very often ‘compromise’ (what we as independent, less than star practitioners have to do within the systems that we would often rather confront). In this instance, there are two layers of participation: one requested from a general audience on the Internet; and secondly, the participation from you, which was performed as a favour to me. Both may be described as the kind of slightly disappointing or wounded salt of things not happening as were expected, but maybe I have to suck on this a bit more, to allow a passage of flavours to come through in engaging with that (non)participation. Something more like the 鹹梅 salty plums I used to love when I was a child——sour, sweet, bitter, savoury and salty.
So if I am to try to take in these five images you posted just a little bit longer, yes, some things made me squirm a little bit, or laugh, doubt, affirm, feel perplexed, and/or smile. The date 2020-06-30 got replaced by a longing for Shanghai about one year earlier, and it felt at first like a betrayal to all that 2020-06-30 means for Hong Kong. On the date of your photo, 2019-05-26, chosen for some other reason of which I am not aware, things had actually already begun boiling here. You, living next to waters with a different name, are not expected to have known that. And so your participation with rain in another city on another day defuses the centrality of importance, like maybe the way that rain probably was once a particle of air which was once part of an ocean with a wholly other name.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for 2020-06-30
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for Fotini
But you want us to know your name. 張小船, big B – big O – big A – big T (x2), little b – big O – big A – big T. I had initially imagined the Fotini exercise to locate searches for meaning, like when we take photos of pages from books to replace taking notes, or record signs as a way of remembering. You’ve shared yourself with us here, in a few guises but you all the same, funnily captured in a print format that is mostly outdated, though it makes sense in the context of you living now in Japan and with what I had asked you before in an audio recording also dedicated to you. So yes, ‘a lot of Boat’——meaning, and a string of things to remember.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for 京蘊 Anouchka
You appeared again with Anouchka, and it was so surprising to see you, ordinarily so shy, now leaning back in this very forthright position, looking at the camera confidently, even if hidden under a cap and sunglasses. Those metal bars must be the Cuban counter to the kind of structures they put in the parks and underpasses of Hong Kong——manmade objects to keep people from public spaces. No loitering, no sitting, no sleeping. But there you are, sitting defiantly on top of them, and though it must be quite uncomfortable, you reveal in the caption the immunity offered by being in the eye of a crush. Now he is crushed in prison and your small secret opened up in the maze of someone else’s archive.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for Nisan
Nisan would probably not be pleased that I’ve translated her idea for a continuous line among discrete objects in this way. So maybe it is fitting that your image leaves a very small gap in the line, which, if we were to put together with the other photos, would break the horizon. It’s not certain whether this subtle subversion on your part was purposeful or simply a visual opening of the ‘rules of participation’, but I’m glad it would be you to do it, just as I am thankful that it would be you to tell me during a long and painful back-and-forth all the horrible things that have gone astray and still be my friend.
Submitted to Visual Diary Archive by 張小船 Boat Zhang for Nina
And maybe that’s why the last one, Nina, is the one to end on, because it’s another intimate space between you and a lover. This time you are the photographer, but for all the power within that role it is a sudden fear from the sudden movement of his sleeping body that clicked this shutter. And this is quite a complex story for a mistaken photograph——at least compared to the majority that I had collected and cannot place at all except by virtue of the photographs taken before and after. Your photo for Nina bears similar warm tones as the ones that she has collected in her archive, though hers are mostly created by the redness of light seeping through skin.
…
I want thousands of beads of sweat from my body to seep through my skin and slip into an ocean that has one name on one side and another name on another. Sometimes these oceans are named after people, while you, on the other side from here, are named after the vessel that keeps us afloat on the sea. It was the most cheeky and romantic of things for your parents to do, but like these images, what I like most are for these smallest of intimacies to be laid bare in a plain space for anyone to know and see, the most subtle invitation for participation. An act of taking notice.
And after those long hours of talking about ‘getting people to do things’, it is still difficult to come up with answers. But you contacted me tonight as I wrote this text, asking for a favour.
So for now——simply——yes, of course.
Posted by 丫 | reply »going everywhere, in stillness
This quote that you once used somewhere, it comes to you, the word emptiness is at the source and in a whim you remember it, but whom was it by and where to find it back – you search and it returns that you wrote it in a post. And the words that have been in you for a while and that potentially felt like an e-mail but to whom, to him? to her? it hits you, better a post. because that emptiness revisits you, an intense happiness, an intense sadness – again that unease, nausea, ‘tedium’, as was the word in that book you shared together so many years ago and was pivotal to you both and to this. i have to move, i have to get out of this place, a sucking motion nearly 12 years long, like hearing it’s been 20 years and not being able to believe, fathom it, crawl into that perspective.
And what caused all of this, a movie, annoyingly so a movie, something so inherently tasked to trigger your emotions. what are we here for, what of your mother, your father. do we forget all the things, the times, the moments, that we share, the details are lost at least. and then right at that moment she calls. you imagine the green hills and the ocean view.
..to fill the emptiness with emptiness and thus to share it.
“Ik wilde eigenlijk al een hele tijd je terug mailen. Om in ieder geval een soort van formeel antwoord op het open einde van de aankoop te geven die informeel al via de chat voorbij kwam. Maar eerst kom ik toch maar terug op die film, goed, slecht, goed, slecht, het blijft heen en weer gaan, en heb hem toch maar nog een keer gekeken, en nog een keer, voor mij heel ongewoon.”
the way sounds, music, make you remember things you’d forgotten about yourself
Posted by a | more »
filled with initials and dotted with territories (for aka-chan)
Dearest aka-chan,
Has it been a big year for you, preceding and to come after the day yesterday which was indeed a day? i think about you often this year, you know, something like the distance of six months and the time of always. it makes me happy your daughter declares you are four years-old this time.
Actually, i celebrated your day in the city where we travelled, four years and 11 months ago. i wrote a message to z and we will meet after the 14th of this month. and probably i will meet mevrouw a at the beginning of next month. and f later in that month. but there are many more initials that have been lost, and sometimes this feels like the ocean, sometimes it feels sad. but i still don’t want to admit regret, so last week i visited an ocean filled with initials and dotted with territories, an ocean that knows very vast and very small at the same time.
At the bottom of a granite hill, there are many seafood restaurants which make this area a popular place to visit. you have to pass through small alleyways filled with creatures in glass tanks, and when you see a jade green postbox you can turn slightly to the right, then keep walking to get to the sea. this is one of the old postboxes from the colonial era, one of only seven left in the city bearing the cipher of King George V, but its freshly painted green-blue is really just a bad moustache.
when you emerge from the alley and arrive at the ocean, actually it looks not so much like the sea but a river. There is another bank with another hill on the opposite side, with granite that is identically uniform and equigranular (the average grain size is just over 2mm) to the granite on this side. There are some aunties and uncles playing cards on this side. Maybe there are on the other side, too. Although it is less than 500 metres across to the other side, it is wide enough not to see aunties and uncles over there. But my aunt used to live on that side, maybe only for about one or two years. Now she lives closer to this side, closer to where our family grew up, which maybe makes sense because here we are at the gateway for the Fujianese immigrants coming into the city. There were also many immigrants from Chiuchow, which is further east and further north from here as you keep heading along the coast. If you keep going further and further east and further and further north, you will arrive in Japan, and it is through this gateway that many Japanese merchants also passed, as well as Portuguese merchants on their way back from Japan.
The ocean is very vast. But here it is very small, less than 500 metres across, and there is a small temple for the goddess 天后 Tinhau. Actually, it is better luck to call her 媽祖 Matsu. She is the goddess of the seafarers, and you will find many temples in this region dedicated to her. Once i visited her island and sat on the cliff of her knees, looking over to China. I fell asleep at one point, and when I awoke, I was in China. Twice when people awoke here, they saw Matsu resting in the clouds——once in 1953, the year my mother was born, and once just last year, when I was halfway between here and Japan.
If you entered the harbour from the east, perhaps Chiuchow or Fujian or Japan, her presence at this gateway would have calmed you, and upon passing through the inlet the water would have indeed been calmer, and you would have rested easy only to be ransacked by the pirates watching from above on the granite hill. there have been gangs and clans and colonisers here, changing hands and moving around for longer than we know. there have been territories since the beginning of these beginnings… something is always east to somebody else. sometimes the view is long and vast, and sometimes it is less than 500 metres across.
新米节夏季末mix ｜ new rice festival end of summer mix
24 july 2013，西湾 saiwan beach，2:00 am
24 july 2013，西湾 saiwan beach from under my tent，maybe around 6 am
02 august 2013，soundwalk in 贵阳 guiyang city，around 9:30 pm
19 august 2013，music to boost worker morale，肇兴 zhaoxing town，around 11 am
20 august 2013，芦笙 battle，肇兴 zhaoxing town，9:39 pm
“火龙果之歌 dragon fruit song”，from the forthcoming album 《在你面前很无邪 No Evil Before You 》by 孙大肆 Joy SUN
are you there are you there
low visibility in thessaloniki, somewhere between the old year and the new year
little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
“don’t fire, but don’t negotiate”
readers’ ideas, on how to catch a pirate.. quite timely.. and what do you think we should do, dear reader? they are still displaying our old content, in a slowly deteriorating form.. sigh..
Posted by f | reply »二OO八 看不见 二OO九
surrounded by family and friends we enter the new year blind. four o’clock, moving rapidly south, smoke-like clouds traveling overseas, engulf the land, the beach abandoned. three hours early or four hours late, another hour early. fireworks and outdoor parties banned, a massacre, an other new year, a blanket, as if called for. “i remember in 1990, maneesha used to say it would be the end of the world soon.” we sleep, prepare for life, the new, and still miss it by two minutes …in blindness, 2009
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