Embodied Transformation Observed Paradoxically from the Real
At times, I eat before sleeping. On the balcony, I take kedgeree—curried rice mixed with beans and fish—as a form of breakfast. It is a traditional British meal, imbued with nostalgia and a faint sense of melancholy.
While the cold wind presses heavily against the body, the warmth of spices and the brightness of the sky offer a contradictory comfort. To be present there is simultaneously to inhabit an opposition.
After a brief rest, I return to making before dawn. Most often, I work with a standing model or with my own shadow. Yet what emerges is always an incomplete self.
We may be said to exist within one another’s gaze and yet not. That gaze is neither metaphorical consciousness nor mere ephemerality; it is fragmented, divided, and isolated.
Following the death of my grandmother, my focus shifted from death itself to that which becomes visible through death—that is, life as such. The repeated processes of creation and collapse appear neither wholly organic nor entirely non-organic, but rather as figures deprived of substance, resembling human presence without corporeality.
By confronting material, mental, and social phenomena directly, I paradoxically juxtapose my own lived subjectivity with the death of another. Life is an active transformation perceived through the body, yet it is also something sensed only through the unconscious.
Within this divided yet inseparable relation, the body remains indispensable as the bearer of identity and volition.
The objective self, however, cannot exist without the gaze of others. The proliferating information that constitutes “me” inevitably deteriorates, until I am reduced to little more than the trace of desiccated skin.
The parallax between “what I am” and “that which makes me myself” implies my own absence—present somewhere, yet existing nowhere.
This ambivalence distorts the act of seeing and elevates it into abstraction. The resulting transformations crystallise as narratives of visibility, materialised through dry lacquer sculpture.
In silence, these works return the gaze of the viewer.