Florescent Pamphlets 1996

Material: Florescent light, book pamphlets, and wire

Language and its syntax are understood only within their own discipline and cultural environment, while religion evolves through historical context and becomes an exclusive belief system formed by language. It is very interesting to see reciprocal action between (1) ambiguous language with inner mathematical structure and (2) how strict religious credo to transcend vulnerable human being. By displacing, paralleling, and overlapping Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Judaic, and Christian religious texts with piercing fluorescent light, I see the mathematical visual form and chaotic ambiguity of the texts as a whole, as well as the penetrating detail of a single word taken out of its own context.


Diary from May 4, 1995
...
Literature, particularly poetry is "a case of walking language's borders - an attempt to express insight at the very edge of the 'platform of language', if we try to go further, we fall off into a misuse of words, into nonsensical jabbering, into the void where the rules give out". (the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language p.72) As matter of fact, like any other system, radical is the act of playing ambiguous extremes along boundaries of the system. In other word, nothing could be radical if pushed completely beyond the existing "platform". Further more, the privilege and legitimate of being a radical and an artist is not given by oneself but by his opponent. We are parasites of the mundane whether it - the mundane - comes from external or internal sources.

When poetry deals with space, "a grief age" (Dylan Thomas), or multilingual poetry like the closing line of T.S. Eliots's "The Wasteland" and section of James Joyce's Ulysses, it seems to me that the fourth dimension is created in terms of the social implication of languages while visually, a two dimensional format is maintained. In my recent drawing, I am interested in how different texts can be overlapped and interwoven. I see the potential third dimension of the texts visually, while I also realize it plays off the edge and transforms the literary connections of each language into a structure of points. (instead of linear interaction) The reading dimension become undefinable. In the poetry of Dylan Thomas, tension comes from manipulating the language at the edge of convention. Multilingual literature create a break or shifting of the reading according reader's degree of understanding of languages. My drawing break two and three dimensional space into scattered pieces that are both visual and literary in a manner that is similar to musical instruments like the piano and Guzheng or any non-linear instrument which acoustic sound is formed by points. The space between points is abstract and created by the listener - or in the case texts - reader.