Next Travel will be to See You Again, 2021
video installation
‘Next Travel will be to See You Again’ consists of one text-based installation ‘Infinitely Close’ and one video installation ‘If You Hold a Chinese Passport You Cannot Travel to Vietnam on 24/02/2020’. The project aims to explore the liminality between virtual/real, fiction/fact, and fake/authenticity.
During the pandemic, I received an illegible letter from an all-but-finished lover, promising a reunion in Vietnam. Right after I booked the trip, Vietnam suspended visas for Chinese citizens. The relationship was soon doomed. The letter, unable to be read; the trip, unable to be taken, became an enigma.
Infinitely Close contains the aforementioned letter and 32 reinterpreted ones altered on photocopies. In order to identify the authentic writing, I discern and differentiate the letter word by word, and consequently, end up with generating new texts out of the initial context. These varied duplicates not only defers the identification boundlessly, but also obscures the distinction between fiction and truth, continually imperilling the genuine existence of a love letter and an exlover. This work questions, destabilizes and exhausts the writer and their authenticity, compelled it into a fluid state that is neither fictional nor factual, authentic nor fake.
If You… is a virtual realization of a trip to Vietnam- the journey I’m incapable of going on in the real. I collect and edit travel videos in Vietnam, place my figure and voice into it to forge it as my own. Meanwhile, two printed itineraries of my actually purchased flights display next to the screen, ambiguously suggesting the credibility of the trip, drawing the viewers into uncertainty. In the duration of 5m35s traveling by proxy in the virtual domain, the boundary of virtuality and reality, fake and genuineness is intentionally blurred.
Next Travel… is not a love story, in fact, it couldn’t be a love story just in the same way as the letter couldn’t be interpreted, the trip couldn’t be proceeded, and the border couldn’t be crossed. If liminality refers to the transitional period from A to B during which the normal limitations are invalid, this project is the experiment of such possibility. It manifests a moment of relaxation and freedom in between two fixed, structurally opposed binaries.