If Spring Could Feel Ache

Towards the concepts of metaphor, mirror, and trauma. I tried to narrate a different story of the contemporary Chinese queer group and query the identity in awareness of diverse collective identities.

‘There isn’t any other origin for beauty than that of a wound, singular, different for each, hidden or visible, that all mankind keeps within itself, that it preserves and to which it retires when it wishes to leave the world for temporary but profound solitude.’(Jean Genet, 2003)

As Jean mentioned, ‘wound’, in some circumstances, is more like a hidden and moaning soul. What I have been concentrate on are those ‘wounds’ and ‘sorrows’ growing with teenagers, especially with adolescents who doubt themselves, query about sexuality, or build their identities through rebellious behaviors. While I am seeking a self-reflection in my tentative work, I attempt to penetrate a deeper layer of people's psychic world, or from another perspective, mine.

While I am facing others, I am gazing at myself by the mirror of the camera, gazing at those wounds on my mind. In my work ‘Could Spring Feel Ache’, I am trying to construct a vague self-portrait by facing the vulnerability of others juxtaposed with performances and staged scenes. What attracts me the most is always the fragile moment of a boy in his adolescent period, the transforming moment could be vulnerable or sentimental, like petals lying down on the road after a breeze.

However, in my works, I am pondering about blurring the line between objectivity and fiction. What I believe is, reality, could never be what you have observed or heard, but what an individual believes.