SYU Jia-jhen [website]

“I collect a piece of you / you collect a piece of me”

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Video, installation and participatory art

2014-2019

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In this work of participatory art, the artist played the role of spiritual mentor, offering materials of belief to people who need them in society. In the guise of playing cards for fortune-telling, the artist usurped the confessions of her participants, carrying out the concept of “mutual collecting”when they interacted with each other. The cards were made by referring to a pile of astrological game cards once sold on the open market. The content of the cards, however, was replaced by the artist’s online diaries. There were 60 cards in total; 52 cards (regular cards) were printed with the same text, parts of diaries the artist had written to document the emotions and moods that she was once ashamed of announcing publicly. In addition, there were eight opportunity cards, each with different hollow spaces. In the beginning, a participant had to ask the artist—the mentor—any question relating to a specific subject that s/he was concerned about, or the state of a person that s/he cared about. Then, the participant drew an opportunity card and placed it on a regular card. By doing so, both the artist and the participant could thus highlight a specific sentence. The artist then engaged in dialogue with the participant, answering the question—even offering a form of therapy—with the emotions and moods she had when writing the sentence.  

The concept of this performative art comes from the artist's "belief" in the emotional commonality of human essence—or, not exactly from this belief, but from her strong desire to be recognized. When interpreting each participant’s question with a highlighted sentence, the artist also got involved in worrying emotions, mostly distress. During the sessions in a closed, heterogeneous, and strange space that only accommodated two people, both of them expected and eventually enjoyed the moment when their emotions reached commonality—a point where they mutually recognized their shared emotions. The artist—as spiritual mentor—imagined and substantialized the image of the participant when engaging with the problem that the person raised; if the participant corresponded to this image, then s/he became one of the artist’s collection. This person would probably never know that s/he had also collected part of the image of the artist during the process. 

         This brilliant artwork re-creates and performs an ancient religious or spiritual activity of mankind that still has enormous significance in modern society. Yet, the purpose of the artwork is not to discuss whether fortune-telling or other forms of spiritual communication are true or not, but to present how complicated and diverse are the mechanisms of different dimensions involved in fulfilling the mystical process.

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