Here it is windless.
There all was breath.
[Diary 1] :
About my graduation work. I performed five times for around an hour per day. I lay flat on the ground with circulation of breathing and pressing my abdomen while pointing my mouth toward the microphone. I took the diaphragmatic breathing method. Take a deep breath, Hold it, and then the diaphragm tightens, flattens, and moves down. It pushes the abdominal contents down, which forces the abdominal wall outward and expand. At the same time, I pressed my abdomen with both hands until I couldn't hold on and exhale, then repeated the above actions. I deliberately changed the normal human breath. Every inhalation, exhalation and holding of breath reached the limit of my ability. I brought my breath to where it felt the most intense to feel my natural limitations, to awaken the automatic response I got. It's consciously controlled breathing, and I want to activate every natural feeling, every detail, every moment to be sensitive to my body's feedback signals.
When inhaling, the abdomen will gradually rise and expand, creating a certain tension and push. There is a brief pause before exhalation, as much as possible to notice and feel the powers of tension and pushing that occurs in the abdomen, also need to pay attention to the beginning of the coming exhalation. When exhaling, the abdomen will gradually drop and contract. Then, there will be another brief pause before the next inhalation. Both two pauses are the beginning of the next action, also the beginning of an exploration into the unknown fields of consciousness. Every change in breathing rate or intensity stimulated my mind and consciousness, and this psychological vibration also affected my breathing. My breathing was no longer a basic behaviour of human beings under the subconsciousness.
Pressing my abdomen hard with my hands is a role of pressure for me. The resistance of my abdomen and the persistence of breath are resistance roles. I try to put pressure and resistance on my body at the same time, to show the elastic relationship between forces in real life and the difference in injury degree. The partial enlargement of these confrontations is to make the body have more sense of existence, to feel how the power is accumulated, stored, and released in a controlled physical environment. However, these forces fight against each other in my body and mind, between spontaneity and receptivity, between control and letting go, between affecting and being affected, and between push and pull. The productive struggle between forces becomes the difficulty I need to work through. Resistance, in fact, is my resistance to multiple selves.
[Diary 2] :
The natural groaning of the body while holding my breath is also important for this work. In real life, with the pain of my trauma, I am often eager to tell about myself and I have an obligation to speak, to make my voice heard. But I don't know how to describe myself, because I don't have my own language to describe it accurately. The language is not limited to English or Chinese. I often suffer from the double torture of having to say something and the unsayable. I began to become chaotic and vague, constantly doubting and denying myself. The action of pressure and resistance is also to show my inner contradictions and anxiety, my pressure on myself, and my resistance to myself. The microphone is often considered as a tool of expression with a definitive, authoritative, and influential metaphor, but I don't have the ability or courage to have it in the real life. The microphone amplifies not only the sound of my breath and the momentary burst of resistance failure but also the process of my psychological changes of inner self-contradictory under the unsaid and the unsayable, the unknown and unknowable. It might be a struggle. It could be a pain. It could be releasing and softening, or something else.
A quote from Samuel Beckett's book, "The Unnamable" aptly helped me to describe this kind of self-contradiction of me.
He said: I’ll have said it, without a mouth I’ll have said it, I’ll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m the partition, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating.
[Diary 3] :
Noise will be generated when my body is idle. The microphone is set up to amplify my breathing and the outside noise between every pause in my breathing cycle. I want to accept the noise, not to control it. I need to attempt to reconcile this encompassing environmental rhythm with my own intimate, internal rhythm of interpretation. Breathing as a vibrational search to attune me to this environment.
[Diary 4] :
About the setting of one hour per day in my graduation work, each hour will not be accurate and completely depended on my perception and my judgment. There was no clock in the space, and no one took charge of telling me when one hour was up. I think it's related to my experience in prison in China before I came here. I knew I only needed to be in jail for 24 hours. I was alone in a room without a clock. I used various time-counting methods and behaviors to estimate how many hours were left to be free. In this work, time was perceived and projected by my consciousness. And the flow of consciousness was perceived and projected according to different rhythms of my body.
I never had an exact answer about how to end every day’s performance. Sometimes it ended up with an emotional breakdown or an exhausting body. Over time, the self was crushed with loss of power, and vulnerability occurred in some kind of real communication. I contained it enough not to suppress it. I placed restrictions in the appropriate range as liberation not as a limitation, converting the relevant passivity and apparent weakness into a potential means of strength. I hoped to accept my pain and this ‘self’ completely and learn to live with them in the end.
[Diary 5] :
I've been thinking about how to deal with my pain. At the very beginning, I tried to use my works as an exit of emotional catharsis to seek self-healing. I also tried to inflict pain on myself which was a bit more painful than the one from reality and put it into my works. But it is dangerous, and those pains have always been unstable and unpredictable. I can't attempt to overcome those pains by comparing or measuring to work out a more painful way. I think about the source of my pain. After the unequal treatment and oppression which I suffered in real life, I was angry and disappointed with my weakness, evasive and imperfect performance. In order to resist the pain of reality, I put on the mask of the strong, and at the same time indulging in the pain of reality, I put on the mask of the weak. Those are both in my heart at the same time, leading to internal division, confrontation, and conflicts that have been unable to solve. My intense desire to resolve internal conflicts has gradually led to a chronic illness caused by psychological anxiety and stress. What I want to show to the audience is my real struggle, with resistance, with fear, with vulnerability, with cost, under the entanglement of a painful mental state. It is no longer a methodology for dealing with pain. It becomes a learning process, a process of knowing myself, a process of learning how to live with pain and myself.
Now every thought disappearing.
Windless Again.
07.2019
