June Bee
October 12th, 2020
The Investigation of Existence Aging in The Aspect of Time and Value: Hsin-Chien Huang
Trace of Age
I flew a lot, especially in the years when I studied abroad in high school. I had this special connection with airplanes. I saw the flight itself was the stage in life in between the heavy past responsibilities and the upcoming possibilities. I was above all the reality yet had not arrive the new start of things. Usually, the change on self of body and mind for the new settings would be completed within the timeframe of the flight. I felt safe pouring out all the emotions brought out by reflections then digesting them carefully and privately on the plane because whatever happened in a plane stayed in the sky. Each time I did this transformation of mind, I threw away unnecessary thoughts and keep the condensed version of the lessons I learned in the past in order to free up enough room for more life had to offer. In the collection of the recalibrated residues from the past, the overlapped parts were what I called “age”. This fluidity measurement of past and time was introduced by Hsin-Chien Huang in his new media performance art, “The Inheritance”, presented in the Chiang Kai-shek Auditorium of the old Taiwan Air Force headquarter in Taipei, Taiwan in 2014 1 He said, “From ancient times to the present, our bodies have always been the instrument and the unit for measuring space-time… I would like to explore is: Can new technologies help us use our heart and spirit as the unit to measure and document the space-time that we are in?” He described this work as blending his private memory into a surreal
1 Hsin-Chien Huang, “The Inheritance ,” Hsin-Chien's New Media Art ProjectThe Inheritance, 2014, https://www.storynest.com/pix/_4proj/per_interitance/p0.php?lang=en
three-dimensional dance performance with the depth in combination of elements like story, 3D printing, real-time motion capture, stereographic projection, 3D interactive image, and historical architecture. He elaborated, “I want to use new media to explore ‘reversed time’ and use new technology to reorganize my personal history. I believe that only when I have a sincere and my own way of recording of the past, I am able to truly understand myself. And that is when future really changes.” This discussion of past connecting to the future was in fact addressing the larger matter of the definition of future, the idea of “the end” of this streamline of memories - the gamut of what was left and what was yet to come.
Crossing In-between the Trace of Time
It was the summer of 2019. I started my gap year. The first stop I visited was Boston. I stayed at my dad’s friend’s house for two months. My dad’s friend was a doctor specifying in healing cancer with her own special treatment of massage and breathing. During the days there, I went to her clinic almost every other day to learn by participating in her research and tried to help from talking to the patients. If I had to described the place, I would say that it feels like the last breath you had before you fall down from a cliff. It was a pure breath of which carried a great amount of proliferating death pressure. “life and death… the two things that co-exist and complement ” written by Roan Ching-yueh in “Old Houses Encounter the City” for the HsinChien Huang’s public installation art, “The Moment We Meet”, presented in Taipei's Taipei 101 MRT station in 2013.2 I started to question, “so is this it? Do we end here? Is this how ‘the end’ look like? What is left?”
2 Hsin-Chien Huang, “The Moment We Meet,” 黃⼼健 創作計畫：相遇時刻, 2013, https://www.storynest.com/pix/_4proj/i_meet/p0.php?lang=ch.
Half way through my gap year, Covid-19 pandemic happened, and I moved back to Taiwan. I found a job in an architect’s firm. Working at the firm for eight months, I started my way from an intern to a full-time employee, from co-workers’ doubts on my age and abilities to be seen as equal as other employees The experience was my nascent world view composed of a mix of meeting, knowing, and understanding different ages of people coming from different backgrounds and carrying various pressure from life. One common thing among these people were that they were still in the productive stage of their lives, working for money, passion, or responsibilities. They were in the middle of life, unlike the cancer patients I met in Boston. This connection in the idea of “final”, “start”, and “progression” in self through time led me answer my question through the idea of Huang’s “The Moment We Meet” installation art The project was a series of early split-flap display matrixes of faces exhibit in the passageway of about 100 meters starting from the basement of Taipei 101 to the subway station, creating a journey of meeting up different ages. Along with the displayed screens, there are twelve books, written by famous writers in Taiwan on the topic of life’s story, offered to passersby to read. The two ends of the books are defined as the elderly and the children. Huang said, “Every face is a book. People flip through the history as passing by the art, eventually they will have the connection of projecting themselves through different ages ” I guessed it’s very easy to summarize the experience of life as one simple word - “growth” However, it was never about the end result. It’s the process which we called “aging”. Aging was not the concept of old nor new in the understanding of time. It was the concept of a collection of meeting ups. They were the layers of responding to life created by meeting different versions of you and others both of diverse mindsets on the timeline. “Perhaps this is the margin that you will pass by the final destination, or the place where you will restart”, written by Chen I-chih displayed in “The Moment We
Meet”. In other words, there was no distinct start and end. If so, how did we measure the quality of it?
The Value in The Aging Process of Intercrossing Traces of Time
“When I was a kid, I enjoyed dismantling watches To me, each watch contained a miniature universe and had its own time. I loved to observe the structurally linked operation of gears, escapements and hairsprings. And what I enjoyed even more was to reassemble every component back in place. My collection of watches with different times was carefully stored in a cookie box. Looking at the hands of watches making different circles, my little mind seemed to experience the mysterious rituals in paralleled universes.”, Huang spoke about his childhood story behind the interactive installation “The Art of Mortal Apparatus Solo Shows” displayed in 2008.3
I left Taipei, the city where I was raised up, in the age of 13 to attend a boarding school, and later moved to the United Sates alone. Ever since, I didn’t live with my family. Moving back to Taiwan this year, I finally lived with my parents and visited the places from my childhood memories. When I was a kid, I remembered the winter being extremely cold in Taipei. However, after years of living in Portland, Oregon, and then came back, I realized that the coldest Taipei could get in the winter was just ten Celsius, which was quite warm comparing to Portland’s winter I also remembered the little library corner in my house, which stored all the books that my dad used to buy every single week to read them to me. Now looking back, it was a precious enlightenment of starting to learn about thinking with my own brain in my early age. The big deals back then became small. The little meaningful events developed its value with time. All
3 Hsin-Chien Huang, “The Art of Mortal Apparatus Solo Shows,” 黃⼼健 創作計畫：⼈間機關術個展, 2008, https://www.storynest.com/pix/_4proj/exh_mortalApparatus/p0.php?lang=ch.
these pieces of the past together were my current world view. Thus, the world was a set of values and a collection of algorithms – mini universes. “As I grew older, I came to be very fond of stories. Stories are like those watches of my childhood. Each story is a universe with its own timeline and spaces, and each character, each scene and each stage property can be compared to the balance wheels, escapements and springs in a watch; their roles are closely connected ” , Huang described this project as audiences being invited and enter this enormous overlapping universes without knowing the intention. He continued, “But the script on the wall is one of the stage properties; it seduces you to read it but refuses to be understood… The audience's "watch" is a performance, and under the conventional ideas about etiquette, actors must avoid one another's eyesight, so they miss the most marvelous parts of the performance ” A gathering of opinioned pieces such as life had the same idea. It was a show which we were all invited to participate and act without seeing and knowing the purpose According to Huang’s portfolio, he had a won the "New Voices, New Visions" competition with his homework in his early academic life. According to Huang, “It was an event organized by Voyager and Interval Research- the former was the top new media company and the later was an R&D oriented business in Silicon Valley.” When you were in it (life), you never knew the complete idea, but once you viewed it with a distance, that was when the idea and content of the value revealed Distance was the key to seeing the true value “Although I had been working as a general art director in online game business for seven years afterward, the honor I had been given has planted seeds in my mind. In 2001, I resigned from Sony and came back to art - my beloved business.” Here, the “distance” for Huang to see the value of his passion of art is “time”. In his later artist career, he had won
several international art awards. One of them being “La Camera Insabbiata VR”, the Best VR Experience Award winner at the 74th Venice Film Festival.4
The Relationship Between Time and Value in Aging
“The giant chalkboards are symbols that represent human memories; although they can be erased and written on repeatedly, the old memories linger on and will not disappear ” written by Huang about “La Camera Insabbiata VR”, a VR interactive installation co-created by American artist Laurie Anderson and him. Corresponding to the idea of time presented earlier. Time was being defined as a fluidity measurement of collected, displayed, and projected memory traces. He described his work as “an enormous labyrinth of memories”. According to Huang’s portfolio, there were eight different rooms, symbolizing eight universes Conforming to the idea of value discussed in the previous passages, these rooms can also be seen as eight set of values or algorithms He said, “These unique rooms convert abstract symbols into concrete and interactive physical presences, allowing visitors to explore within them the connections between written words and memories.” Value was being defined as the distanced viewpoint toward the collected, displayed, and projected memory traces. The ratio is in the flying length of that fligh.
This interactive art expressed the idea of engaging in redefinition of the boundaries in time and the recreation of the value in the defined period of time. The ratio between time and value in aging was the degree of believing and affection in the memory traces For me, this was the stage of me on a plane recalibrating the past and present time in order to be prepared for the future. The cohesive space on the plane was where aging occurred. And the ratio between them was the debate happened in the length of flying.
4 Hsin-Chien Huang, “La Camera Insabbiata VR,” Hsin-Chien's New Media Art ProjectLa Camera Insabbiata VR, 2018, https://www.storynest.com/pix/_4proj/i_laCameraInsabbiata/p0.php?lang=en
“Maybe, aging is the point of where and when and how I landed.” I thought.
Bibliography
Huang, Hsin-Chien. “La Camera Insabbiata VR.” Hsin-Chien's New Media Art Project La Camera Insabbiata VR, 2018. https://www.storynest.com/pix/_4proj/i_laCameraInsabbiata/p0.php?lang=en.
Huang, Hsin-Chien. “The Art of Mortal Apparatus Solo Shows.” 黃⼼健 創作計畫：⼈間機關 術個展, 2008.
https://www.storynest.com/pix/_4proj/exh_mortalApparatus/p0.php?lang=ch.
Huang, Hsin-Chien. “The Inheritance .” Hsin-Chien's New Media Art ProjectThe Inheritance, 2014. https://www.storynest.com/pix/_4proj/per_interitance/p0.php?lang=en.
Huang, Hsin-Chien. “The Moment We Meet.” 黃⼼健 創作計畫：相遇時刻, 2013. https://www.storynest.com/pix/_4proj/i_meet/p0.php?lang=ch.