Text/ Juan Yung-Ｈan
"My heart gradually takes shape through the experiences and trials of my body. If that shape doesn't signify imperfection, then what does it mean?" - Xi Song, "Nezha in the Investiture of the Gods," 1971.
The social norms faced by individuals in a community act as a surgical tool that shapes the individual's physical image. In a world that values practicality and efficiency, society's expectations of individuals, like an amputation surgery, remove the "impossibilities" from their physical image, inhibiting the potential for unique individual imagination. However, the section of the mental gland that is not properly treated sometimes does not heal or scab over with time. We can still, at certain moments, perceive the true emotional pulse of the gland.
Observing these mental sections also examines the connection between the individual and the "impossible." This display of connection, like installing a prosthesis, allows individuals to explore the hidden problems between themselves and their communities in a different form. Dreams are phantom limbs of consciousness, preserving the individual's experiential and memory-based existence, providing clues when piecing together lost images. The visualization of dreams may help us contemplate the various remnants of the sensory system in the body image.
When an individual, within the acceptable range of the other party in a relationship, breaks the predetermined image imposed by the other party, the individual gains an opportunity to expand their sensory contours. In a transcendent moment that can be enjoyed, the other party may respond to the individual's "transgression" with intimate reproach. However, within the ambit of time, when the individual's image undergoes a qualitative change that exceeds the other party's acceptance, the predetermined image of the individual also collapses. The image shattered by bodily transformation thus becomes a hypothesis, creating a virtual rupture.
In addition to interpersonal interactions, there is also this image exchange of expectations between individuals and the state, locality, and beliefs. In order to stabilize relationships, commitment becomes a currency, acquiring people's imagination of the future. But when promises are broken, do oaths turn into debts? Can the imagined debts still be repaid through imagination? The advanced image continues to disintegrate in overwork. In an era where eloquence triumphs over truth, have people become accustomed to incorporating dismembered realities into a symbolic whole through forgetting?
Dolls are one of the tools I use to contemplate human forms. As an extension of the human body's ideation, dolls have the function of disassembling and reassembling the puppeteer's body. The puppeteer trains their own body to manipulate the doll's body, operating reality within the virtual. Puppetry techniques make the bodies of both the puppeteer and the doll more open, and this technique also includes various ways of projecting emotions onto the doll or object. In order to achieve physical movement of the doll, the puppeteer must become the carrier of the doll. In the moment of synchronization between the person and the doll, the puppeteer and the doll can both produce another version of themselves in the performance. The person manipulating the doll and the doll being manipulated thus create a state of mutual follow-through in the performance.
However, in the experience of contemporary puppetry, my gaze often lingers between the puppet's body on stage and the puppeteer's body. When I focus on the puppeteer, I often feel a certain sense of regret. Focusing on the puppeteer means that to some extent, I overlook the labor and effort of the puppeteer. Conversely, when the doll becomes the focus, I cannot ignore the contribution of the puppeteer in giving life to the doll. This contradictory emotion has led me to ponder whether there is still space for other narratives in the puppetry movements that mediate between storytelling and the doll. Besides making the doll generate movement, can I also imbue the puppeteer's body and actions with more meaningful connections in the performance?
I attempted to answer this question with a passive body. Using the doll to manipulate the limbs, I collected the residual value of labor from the exhausted limbs through various images. The images that unfold on the body's surface after the limbs dissolve transform the body's kinetic energy and constitute three puppet animations describing the labor of the moving body. Like phantom limbs, these images accompany memories that haven't been forgotten, explaining the reasons why the actions continue in the body's overwork.