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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.
People once had who they were defined by the narratives they belonged to. A narrative is not mere fiction. It shapes an individual’s perception and is the fundamental basis on which humans engage with the world. From culture, ethnicity, religion and ideology to the routines of everyday life, we always live within the structure of narratives; through them we find meaning in the world and coexist with others.
Ours is an age without a universal “grand narrative” in society. At the end of the twentieth century, the last “grand narrative” that bound people together was dismantled after a series of tragedies and, under the inhuman logic of economic rationality, was for a time reduced to countless small narratives. A “grand narrative” gives those who belong to it a strong sense of exaltation and belonging, and the feeling of devoting one’s life to a purpose beyond the individual. At the same time, narratives tend to exclude other narratives and to swell into a single “grand narrative.” When one narrative gains strength as “justice,” it pushes other narratives aside and acts as a “gravity” that crushes the truth of the individual. We cannot live without narratives. Yet narratives can at times become weapons.
Without a grand narrative I am left with a vague anxiety and a sense of difficulty in living; 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 that art holds a distinctive attraction capable of counterbalancing the “gravity” of narrative, or the “weightlessness” of narrative’s absence.
Art generates the irresistible attraction of “beauty.” In the past, this force worked to strengthen the gravity of grand narratives or to draw people toward other narratives. I, however, use this attraction to pass through the gravitational field of narrative and perform a “swing-by” that changes its trajectory. This is not a negation of narrative itself, but a change of orbit that makes use of narrative’s own gravity.
The attraction of beauty has the power to free us at once from the pressure of being drawn into existing narratives and from the suffering of having no narrative to rely on. The feeling of finding something beautiful shakes the singularity of reality and allows multiple meanings to coexist in a single phenomenon. The effect of beauty moves consciousness, temporarily, 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, the conditions of cognition are exposed: how unconsciously I had been constructing the world by choosing particular meanings.
To accomplish this swing-by, my work expresses as “beauty” opposing time axes, values and narrative viewpoints: the micro and the macro, past and future, one truth and the truth that stands against it. I gaze at the accumulation of time dwelling in minute matter, or connect uncertain narratives with material media that can historically be regarded as true. This intersection of viewpoints has a structure in which fragments of everyday life evoke grand narratives, and the small narratives hidden behind grand narratives are imagined. By letting multiple narratives that are fundamentally irreconcilable coexist in the same space, the work attempts to encourage viewers to move away from the gravity of the narrative that says “you must be someone.” Through this swing-by, consciousness reaches a region, like interstellar space, that is free of narrative’s gravity. What awaits beyond this self-forgetting is “the reacquisition of an autonomous self.”
When people step out, once, from the framework of the narrative that says “you must be someone,” and return to the fundamental sense that they are part of the world and that the world is part of them, they can arrive at a state in which they are able to redefine their own lives by their own will. This, precisely, is the idea I want to leave in the world through artistic expression. It is a catalyst for the “self-forgetting and reacquisition of the self” that narrative and beauty weave together, and leaving such a catalyst in this world is the role I intend to fulfil here 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?