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.

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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.

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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.