the love letters that she wrote back to me

ongoing project with Yen Yi Lee

                                    Everyone is an accumulative entity, we define ourselves as an

individual, and however, we related to other people by sharing common

experiences, incidents in which the state of mind at the very moment.

Experience is being produced through creation, narration, and

reflection, through each story telling process, we reinforces meaning

by adding new discovery to it.  Memory is alive in this sense, which

is not just something happened in the past, but a state of mind which

is travelling alongside of our body.

This proposed project evolves from my own search for identity and

dealing with mixed ethnical backgrounds. Yen Yi and I started

collaborating in 2011 when we met eachother in Edinburgh. We

spontaneously started photographing each other in my small studio

space under my desk.

Dreams are called dreams because it will never come true.  The photo

shooting process happened under the table, it was naughty, escapist

and nostalgic. Teenagers dress up as an adult because they can’t be,

Ancient emperors look for means to achieve immortality. Lipstick is a

symbol of adulthood, an adventure for teens, an evidence of boundary

crossing, and ascertains of femininity, which symbolize our playful

emotion represent our in-between state, the growing nostalgia of the

past, childhood memory and the fear of adulthood.

This gave a sort of intimate space for us to work in and we decided

to experiment with make up. By photographing each other in such a

small claustrophobic space a sort of childish teenager emotion was created

while we posed in front of the camera. We both are interested in the idea

of  being a grown up and having desires to stay young and girlish without responsibilities.

In our daily conversations we talked about our past and different

love stories with different men. I decided to write Yen Yi about the

different love affairs I had in the past. Each letter contains an

intimate moment. Parts of these letters Yen Yi will translate in

Chinese in this way I receive my own love letter back in an unreadable

way for me.  I think this resembles the way that I deal with those

intimate situations; I would like to talk about them again and again.

But I never completely understand myself when I think about love and

how I deal with relations. To receive my own love letters in a

language that I can’t read reflects this emotional state.

By posting each other our love letters, we rewrite about and through

reading and writing, receiving and sending thus to create a reciprocal

dialogue. Sending back Sarojini’s love letter in my mother tongue

create a paradox for me and her, through the process of rewriting, I

become familiar with her story and trying to engage with her feeling

with a totally different time space, this could be an experiment for

me as a time travel, to experiment the time and space as another

individual.  Through my translation, all the bodily memory of Sarojini

will be defamiliar by my language which she can’t not decode, nor can

discern the possible misconstrued meaning.  Words and language become

unreliable, emotion being distorted.