THRESHOLD

Two months observation/research in six fourtune teller, six events, mixed realities.

Exhibited in the "Percieving the Nearby 500m" section of 2022 Hongkong Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture

ARCH 3101 | Fall 2022

Instructor: Hanna Tulis

The project "Threshold" is about the events I encountered, and captured near my home. All arranged in the form of the origami “fortune teller”, these series of collage explore multiple dimensions of reality through the operation of the folding and unfolding process. The operation of the origami “fortune teller” explores space and events as a process with an open outcome, multiple possibilities, and temporally open-ended results. Within the fixed combination of the fortune teller, what kind of fabulation would you conjure?

[A] clean

[B] small objects

[C] midium objects

[D] large objects

[E] barely can walk

[F] door opened fig.1

Snapshots of exit staircase in my apartment building:

Christmas trees, two-meter-large oil paintings, giant chess pieces that only appear in sports playgrounds, and the most popular occupants, bicycles and shoe racks.

Examination charts of objects' occupancy status of each floor in the egress staircase.

Diagram showing the threshold, private and public realm in the egress staircase

Exit Somewhere

Featuring a well-recorded personal research about the exit staircase in my apartment in Shenzhen, China, This is the research behind one of the fortune tellers.

The exit staircase in my apartment building is occupied by my neighbors' personal belongings, in which the "exit '' is less a public escape route, but rather a private extension of the domestic realm. Yet those objects are arranged in a restrained position to leave space for escape. Thus the landing becomes a threshold between the private and the public --- it is the neighbor's extended home, the public corridor, the storage room, the escape route, the connection between me and the neighbors I have never known, an entrance, an exhibition.

On exit sign: "My own lure was the surreal and subversive potential of the signs -- in other words, a flipping upside down of the reality around me. We had in common a desire for an altered reality, whether latently hostile to the signs or drawn toward the possibilities of what else might take their place."

-- Exit, Laura Waddell

These series of fortune teller explore multiple dimensions of reality through the operation of the folding/unfolding process:

1.Reality (an image I took)

2.Manipulated reality ( my dissection of elements relating to the event )

3.Fantasy (my fabulation based on the reality)

The fortune teller starts with an image of the exit staircase (fig.4 reality), then as one unfolds, a series of doors taken in the exit staircase is revealed (fig.5 manipulated reality). As one continues to unfold, a fantasy layer shows my imagination based on the objects outside my neighbors' doors(fig.7). Fully unrolled, the fortune teller exhibits a mixed reality.

Installation in 2022 UABB Bi-City Biennale: (photo credit: Jason Ho)

Like the delivery lockers in almost all the neighborhoods in China, the installation, a magenta delivery locker contains 30 works with the prompt "perceiving the nearby 500m" including my fortune tellers. Delivery locker is a daily device that is ubiquitous in our lives and represents the order of the government's grid management. fig.7

The installation features packages waiting to be unpacked by viewers - since the artists were restrained by COVID traveling policy, instead they just shipped their work to the location. Also, the installation encourages the viewers to pick up any packages and play around with them, or they can even become participants and add their work to the delivery locker. Later on, the locker becomes a graffiti wall, where viewers leave comments and respond to each other. Thus the installation becomes a dialogue fig.8

Fortune tellers on site fig.9

Some passers-by didn't know that the courier cabinet was an exhibited work, and thought it was a storage cabinet used by the organizers of the Biennale for exhibition visitors. We can often see that the audience will put their personal belongings into the empty boxes of the express cabinet, and unconsciously, these personal belongings become exhibits in the express cabinet.