circle

垃圾山水 / trash-land-art no.6, repulse bay, hong kong 2013

my works don't last. usually they only live for a couple of hours. this is the most honest way to make art for me. it is very close to the nature of things. coming and going. rising and falling. growing and decaying. in a traditional sense art has always been about halting the wheel of time, about trying to make beauty last. a good piece of art gives the illusion to transcend the ephemerality of life. a moment in time, captured, frozen so that we may relive, refeel that same moment inside our perception, inside our reality, inside the here and now. eventually even that will go, everything will go, even the cave paintings that have lasted 35 thousand years. my works come from the opposite direction, they start at the other end. more like breathing in and breathing out, like tidal waves. trash comes with the pull of the moon. we come and see and recognize. then we collect, we curate and rearrange reality. then pause. capture and share. then we breath out, clean-up, carry the loads away. the sun sets. we go. quiet. there is always the question: is it enough? but we are too tired to answer it. not now. we're at peace. coming back a week later the beach is trashed again. press repeat: it seems to be the same beach, the same trash, the same effort. but it couldn't be more different. every installation is a story in its own. it has its own actors, time and outcome. the only constant is change. the only constant is the circle of coming and going.

'circle' installation, proposal for plasticity-forum, cascais, portugal 2015