Finally learn to fear

Faced with a blank piece of paper, now I don’t know how to create or respond.

Ironically, for many years I thought "creating" was something I "wanted to do." Perhaps I associate creation with work too often, and after working on other people’s creations, I pay more attention to the service, labor, consumption, and contribution of different people and technologies in so-called works and projects. It’s not natural to create your own work. English is also straightforward, such activities can be called "work". The title of "professional artist" and the way I work make me unable to reach high, especially when I choose to walk between different social gaps, have no choice or fail to enter the existing system or rules, and have to face back and forth on how to earn income. Questions, we always have to ask ourselves what kind of society we participate in? Continuously feedback and examine in detours and stagnation, touching from beginning to end and swallowing. I still aspire to produce revolutionary, rebellious, challenging, alternative, and thoughtful works that will remain in people’s memory—I reveal such ambitions at the beginning of the article, which makes the readers and even myself doubt my creations. Sincerity or purity, I found that the act of creating is often only talked about. How can labor, creation, and participation go hand in hand in our environment?

Or maybe I’m always dealing with the same question: How do I find a way to set myself free? It’s an innocent question, but allowing yourself to truly create is hard. Always diving, wandering between various spaces. He has the ability to shuttle between social media platforms used by different cultures inside and outside the wall, but he is safely hidden in the chat box, hoping for likes in the circle of friends, and has not yet entered the square of the public network to understand the world; or on the other side of the network, even though he is aware of the platform With it in your hands, you can rest assured that as long as the Story disappears after 24 hours, everything will be fine. I haven’t properly participated in a piece of land, and I haven’t been able to publicly leave text in the bubble window. Or just get ready and eager for a brief performance on stage. Hesitating between self-reflection and self-suppression, being too cautious about the different rules between different online worlds and real lands, and being bound by the moral sense between these gaps. So, during the years when I repeatedly clicked on, swiped away, and closed the pages of matters, I didn’t dare to read too much and couldn’t start writing, thinking that it would take more courage to truly grasp this precious place that I believed in. Or I often leave excuses for my unconfident Chinese expressions, forgetting that I have always believed that nakedness is indeed a precious thing. Late. However, today I finally decided to learn how to walk again and experience how to create. Rather than finally facing the shame in my heart, it is better to say that I finally got up from lying down and curled up.

At the beginning of 2021, I decided to leave the United States, where I had lived for 11 years since I was 15, and decided to face and make up for what I thought I had missed about China. In the three years since I returned to China and Shanghai, I may have used many clumsy ways to understand my surroundings. In the name of work, I visited many people and towns in different states who still spent every day in warm water. I used labor (even physical work) to atone for my sin of uneven perspective. At that time, I thought that if I had the ability to flow through a city that needed to scan the place code, and refused to wear a seemingly useless mask, I would have short-term freedom. Perhaps years of dislocation caused me to be unfamiliar with the surrounding and adjacent environments, and it was difficult for me to establish active relationships.

While feeling guilty, I could only respond with a stagnant body. In the Shanghai Spring of 2022, I was unable to volunteer in the community where I lived. Even for neighbors who see each other every day, they can only respond with a brief nod while queuing up for nucleic acid tests. At most, they go to the gate of the community and bring the supplies of the entire building back to each door. I can't participate and don't want to connect with the community. After the lockdown was lifted, it was June before summer arrived. I always wanted to run, walk or ride a bike on the street alone. I realized that this was the first time I had taken a closer look at the city since I grew up, and it actually started from the nucleic acid kiosks on every street corner. Every time I go to the city, I feel like I have finally experienced the so-called "virtuality" of movies after many years: low-quality pictures and videos that have been continuously uploaded, downloaded, reversed, and uploaded in the Moments and video accounts during the three months. The streets, communities, and gates that I passed are now as real as a movie set, but there are more fences than the limited images, there is less of the climax that was gathered and pulled, and there is no sound of hissing and cracking the lungs. It wasn't until the winter of the same year that I actually walked on the streets of Shanghai with everyone for the first time. If this is "connection". Finally, it finally succeeded in transforming the shame I had felt for leaving this land for many years into real fear and fear, but also some satisfaction. These fears always come from delusions from a distance, or we can only try to understand what we cannot understand through experiencing the stories of struggles of people in other places. This time it is no longer just about hiding behind the screen or avoiding between platforms, but what is reflected here is the silent walking and observation, or in order to protect one's own safety, only dare to hide the camera phone in the arms, and criticize that There is no shouting, and the self is still stagnant.

I recorded the two days of that weekend like this: "Perhaps the most powerful moment at the intersection is when we stand together, face to face on the opposite corner of the street, even if it is only for a few seconds, the longest can be several minutes. This moment is quiet Yes, my friend on the right and I interlocked with each other, and I held arms with the friend on the left. We also looked at each other to confirm each other’s temperature, heartbeat, and feel at ease. Such silence seemed to condense into a powerful ball of fire above the intersection. It is threatening to several parties. Although we did nothing, we just watched and were watched by them. Maybe we also listened to each other."

The method I was used to was working with a camera, which was watching, retaining, listening and accompanying each other from a distance. Of course, all this happens before walking, plundering, gazing, frivolous looking and listening, and after reflection. I am more willing to believe that when we approach the world of different people with machines in hand, we can only stay together for a while, so that it seems that we have co-existed in the same time and space, and even the records of memory allow us to see and understand Continue. A glance is sometimes the most involvement we can do, retaining care. Indeed, I am used to stopping and picking up things while traveling, so that I can share, harvest and communicate.

The flowing advantages and power we have gained are like the Virtual Private Network we rely on, which makes me feel that I have seen more people and the world. It is a daily infrastructure that allows us to live outside multi-dimensional networks, cultures, societies, and geographical borders at the same time, but it also allows us to become accustomed to covering up, lurking, and escaping in the illusion of flexibility and comfort. The "virtual" here is romantic, sometimes it is the irresistible sexual temptation, the emperor's new clothes, supporting our luck with a seemingly solid bottom line. I use this virtuality to make up for the delusion of separation in my heart, but how do I understand every real speech or dive, action or stagnation, participation or silence? Which piece of land is it for? Is it still far away? It's both lucky and dangerous.

It is the luck and the danger to free flow by either letting go or choosing the courage to confront and act with responsibility; the luck and the danger to adopt methods from one place to another without comprehensively understanding the needs of the local; the danger and the luck to know of the community codes and tactics of another without being able to apply to our physical communities here; the danger and the luck to cry for the greater pain afar while also shedding tears with loved ones here; the luck and the danger to be private in order to be public; the luck and the danger of feeling both privileged and ashamed.

Shame, this feeling is the deepest trace left in my life experience of swimming and walking. This is what I have been trying to express over the years, but I don’t know how to explain it clearly. Maybe just selfishly trying to feel better. Be active in the flow, not hide, avoid, and leave things to chance. Maybe the same is true for languages, between Chinese and English, and here, I also want to experience more between simplified and traditional Chinese. Then, there is the desire to exist together.

The desire to pull outward, stretch, grasp, give... forward, backward, back and forth... I long to finally cry out to the fiber optic cables under the sea amid the connections and obstacles of the network. I also long to really engage in and respond to activities, no longer being cautious, but taking every step of uploading, exchanging, waving, shaking hands, applauding...as work and as action. Maybe it won’t stop at the performance stage, even if I have already walked outside the white box or the black box, but today I will really approach every space, both private and public, so that every time I stay, watch, listen, Accompanying may occur. before walking out again.

Stay here first.