In this edition of Show & Tell, we return the power of exhibition to the audience and participants. Everyone brings an object – an old photo, a doll, a pair of glasses …… They are all seemingly insignificant fragments of reality, but carry complex personal experiences and collective memories, and become a medium for us to re-examine “reality”. It becomes a medium for us to re-examine “reality”.
What I brought with me was a piece of paper with the Mona Lisa printed on it.
This is a familiar image to almost everyone, but it is also the most “unreal” existence. She originally belonged to an oil painting in the Louvre, but now it has been infinitely copied, printed, and appropriated – from museums to merchandise labels, from souvenirs to emoticons, and has long since been removed from the time, space, and artistic context of the original work. This piece of paper is the ghost of an image, and the constant remodeling of a “classic” by popular culture.
I think that such an object is worth bringing here because it forces a key question:
When we are confronted with a “familiar” image, what are we really looking at? Is what we believe to be “real” the image itself, or the cultural narrative built around it?
In this session, instead of discussing the authority of the original work of art, we will focus on the perceptual relationship between objects and people. This piece of paper is not just a copy of an image, but a “heterotopia of reality” – it exists in my hands, but also fictitiously represents some distant “artistic truth. It is a “heterotopia of reality” – it both exists in my hands and fictionalizes some distant “artistic truth”. In this space of “telling and listening”, it is no longer just an image, but a unit of reality that can be discussed, questioned and redefined.
We will engage in a collective dialog around these objects, inquiring about the mechanism of reality construction. From the artist’s creation, to the spatial structure, from the way of perception, to the public experience, every step of the process tries to dismantle “reality” as a sum of vision, hearing, memory and power relations. This “Mona Lisa” may be like an entrance in our dream journey, leading us to another possibility of reality.
group meeting
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