Introduction

Introduction

Being in time and space is the basic element artists work with. Whether you know it or not, you live it and breathe it like air. Philosophers think about it, poets write about it, artists express it through various mediums. For me, it is a journey of investigation that I have been on for a few years. Exiting a ‘successful’ corporate life in conventional terms, I search for the deeper meaning of life - the essence of being and existence. Many answers are to be discovered while more questions are raised as I try to dig deeper. Having grown up and lived in both Eastern and Western cultures, I have turned to ancient Greek and East Asian philosophies for wisdom. Fortunately, art found me on this journey, or as I called it - a salvation and a grounding medium for me to connect with and view this complex world. On this journey, I discovered paths were laid by so many ancestors in history, philosophy, science, humanity and new paths are being explored every day. Through changing time and social development, some paths are in debate and some still stand strong. I have learned that the ultimate goal is not about seeking the truth, but an adventure both outwards and inwards. By practicing art on this journey, there are the being, thinking and making. Each state weighs equally important and influences each other. This could be a life-long journey. However, in this dissertation, I wish to diarise the discoveries during this particular period of my life, which is also an unprecedented time in the modern days - a world-wide crisis - ‘covid-19 pandemic’.

To me, life always exists in the cycle of birth and death. There is no absolute order nor permanence. It costs us a pandemic to be reminded, to pause and reflect on different aspects of life, to go down to the roots of being and existence through our lived experience. In the book ‘ Being and Time’ by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, he addresses that ‘being is time’ and ‘being towards death’ as any natural being exists in the temporal duration between birth and death. 1 Therefore, I am diarising the passage of time as an observer with questions on being, from the perspective of objects, people and their surrounding environment. I also attempt to exercise this writing in a poetic way, in the same way of my art practice to document the process of so-called ‘becoming who one is’ by Nietzsche 2 . It is a rhythmatic documentation of a temporal duration with childhood memory flashbacks and momentary perception at present.

What is it like to observe the world In fragments and abstraction, metaphysics through its existence? What is it like to experience being present, zen-ness, stillness, emptiness, transience/eternal, Yin/Yang And all things between the binary As a being but not limited to a human being?

Though this writing is a light touch on a broad topic, it is simply written from my thoughts and experiences in order to find a poetic way of living in the mundane, to find the silver-lining to keep going and becoming oneself. As Bergson describes, there are two different selves, the fundamental self which is our inner state as living things and the social representation which is the external projection of the other; only the former is free. 3

1 Martin Heidegger, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (Malden Blackwell, 2013). 2 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche : Life as Literature (Cambridge (Ma) ; London: Harvard University Press, Cop, 2002). 3 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will : An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Whitefish, Mt: Kessinger Publishing, 2011), p. 231 (p. 231).