EN / 日本語
Toward the Lagrange Point Between Narrative and Beauty
Statement, or the Guiding Principles of My Practice
Tai Hei Soejima
Who are we, and what are we trying to become? In an age when the truth of information wavers and uncertainty has become the norm, I pose the question “What narratives are necessary for humans to be human?” and, through making work, explore the meaning of human life.
A narrative is not mere fiction. It shapes an individual’s perception and is the fundamental basis on which humans engage with the world. Ours is an age in which the universal “grand narrative” has been reduced to countless small narratives. A grand narrative gives those who belong to it a strong sense of belonging, yet it tends to exclude other narratives and swell into a single story. When one narrative gains strength as “justice,” it acts as a “gravity” that crushes the truth of the individual. We cannot live without narratives, yet narratives can become weapons.
Without a grand narrative I am left with a vague anxiety; yet I also feel, in the violence of being gathered into a single narrative, a threat to my survival as an individual. Within this contradiction, I believe art holds a distinctive attraction that can counterbalance the “gravity” of narrative, or the “weightlessness” of its absence. Art generates the irresistible attraction of “beauty.” I use it to pass through the gravitational field of a narrative and change its trajectory, a “swing-by.” This is not a negation of narrative, but a change of orbit that makes use of narrative’s own gravity.
This attraction frees us at once from the weight of being absorbed into an existing narrative and from the suffering of having no narrative to rely on. When we find something beautiful, the singularity of reality is shaken, multiple meanings coexist, and consciousness moves into a state of “self-forgetting,” in which the boundary between subject and object blurs. This is not the disappearance of meaning. Rather, it is an experience in which, as countless meanings arise at once, we become aware of how unconsciously we had been constructing the world by choosing particular meanings.
Through making work, I gaze at the accumulation of time lodged in minute materials and connect uncertain narratives with material media that history may regard as true. I bring opposing time axes, values and viewpoints (the micro and the macro, past and future, one truth and the truth that stands against it) into the same space as “beauty.” By letting narratives that cannot be reconciled coexist, I hope to encourage viewers to move away from the gravity of the narrative that says “you must be someone.” What awaits beyond this self-forgetting is the reacquisition of an autonomous self, one able to redefine its own life by its own will. Leaving a catalyst for this “self-forgetting and reacquisition of the self” in the world is the role I intend to fulfil as an artist.
But that, too, is nothing more than one narrative. That is why I return to the question: what narratives are necessary for humans to be human?