AIR at Treasure Hill :
Solo Exhibiton-
SEE THE IMAGE, FORGOT ME NOT
2015, Jun. 12th
Saturday afternoon, you dress up nicely, taking a small trip with your friend here.
“Let’s take a photo!” your friend said. So you hold your pose perfectly, waiting for your friend to press the button.
“Excuse me! Could I _________?” All of a sudden, someone jumps out and asks you this question.
Later on, your friend takes several photos of you, and you bring all the images back home with you, as souvenirs of this trip.
As for your _______, it is left here, as other people’s souvenirs, for long or short.
— “See the Image, Forget Me Not—Li Hui Huang’s solo Exhibition”, Jun., 2015, Treasure Hill Artist Village.
I had an assortment of documentation after doing my projects “See the Image, Forget Me Not”, and “Hello I am the Artist in the Residence”. Instead of showing this footage as a direct recording of my live performance, I was more interested in restructuring the materials to represent the historically transient status of Treasure Hill in my solo show. This show was held in an old house at Treasure Hill artist village, which was more like a residential space than a gallery one. There were three rooms (plus a restroom) inside of the house (See the plan); based on the structure, I wanted to give each room a different place in time, to illustrate the 3 levels of transience in my piece: the long term resident (years, Room A+ restroom), the artist in residence (months, Room C), and the visitor (hours, Room B). I used this division as an invisible line to place out the documentation
Residents: Years
Room A + Restroom
After I did my shadow/body-tracing project (See the Image, Forget Me Not) at Treasure Hill, I would take photos of the chalk outlines—like ghosts imprinted on different surfaces— each day, until I finished my residency. I patrolled around, seeing the fading-out process of the outlines, also observing the environmental changes around them: the floor got wet and dried out again, chairs and scooters moved around, little things like this. All of this implied the routine daily life at Treasure Hill. I wanted to use these photos to bring up a sense of the passage of time at this spot.
2015 / 05/ 16
2015 / 05 / 22
2015 / 06 / 04
In the middle of Room A, there were 3 printed transparent films hung from the ceiling. The image on each of them was the same person’s chalk outline, only with different levels of fading. I found some old furniture in the village warehouse, so I arranged them against walls inside of Room A. Then I traced out their outlines with pink chalk, and then removed them from the room. Like I mentioned before, previously the house itself was a residential unit, and by leaving the pink chalk outlines of the old furniture, I was trying to imply the existence of prior residents. The only light source was set in a corner of the room and when the audience stepped inside of this space, their shadows would be shown on the walls, and they would witness their presence moving among the outlines of the “ previous living room space”.
The video played on the TV in the restroom was an extension of Room A. This footage was composed of my daily photos of the left chalk traces in chronological order. The audience would sit on the toilet and watch it, as in a daily life setting.
Tourists: hours
Room B
I presented in this room the documentation from “See the Image, Forget Me not”, mainly focused on the tourists’ participating process and interaction among themselves. On the walls were sets of photos, each set included:
1. The original tourist photo.
2. People in the same pose with their chalk outlines.
3. The chalk outlines only
I also encouraged participants to add some decoration around their outlines (by drawing with chalk), like what they often do for their selfies. One of the TVs played the drawing process, and the other one played the interactions among participants.
Artists: Months
Room C
Inside of the room I set up 2 projectors diagonally. Projector 1 played the footage (video1, green corner) of me drawing the visitors’ body outlines in slow motion (See the Image, Forget Me not). Projector 2 played the footage (video2, yellow corner) of me greeting the tourists outside of my residential house (Hello I am the Artist in the Residence). In video 1, participant’s bodies responded to the space. In order to trace their shapes, I needed to climb up and down, shuttling between the body and the space. In video 2, I ran around the inside of my house greeting the visitors. They could only see my body behind the windows, but with different eye levels caused by the geography of the residence. My body postures in the 2 videos somehow echoed each other, emphasizing my presence at Treasure Hill.
My presence here stated one thing: the reason why I could stay for 3 months as an artist is based on the fact that years ago Treasure Hill was turned into an artist village (the same reason that brings tourists to it). This outcome was the result of a tense balance between various interests, even though back then it might have been the best solution. And yet, when Treasure Hill turns into more a photo-taking background than a living place, I still exposed my obsession by repeating the same sentence…
“See the Image, Forget Me Not ”.