Worn Away
2022—2023
digital file．color and black and white．sound．69’ 30”．single-channel video
Motivation and Methodology
It is impossible to predict at exactly what point the technological singularity will emerge, but in substance, we are already living in an empire constructed by a corporatocracy of multinational financial-capital corporations, military-industrial complexes, and digital and biotech giants. Through the global Internet, the empire manipulates how the vast majority perceives the world, and the common people, influenced by pervasive control technology, are led into various spaces of disorientation while almost all dissenting voices are marginalized.
At this juncture, the authenticity of countless events has become increasingly difficult to determine. This leads one to consider the difference between Western and Eastern perspectives on illusion. To facilitate the distinction and for ease of expression, the Sanskrit term māyā can be used for the Eastern perspective, which is primarily from Buddhism.
In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the distinction between mere shadows and reality is absolute, and these two elements, illusion and reality, are set in opposition. In Buddhism, however, māyā or illusory appearances, refers to the fact that everything in the universe is in a state of constant flux, and that nothing possesses an absolute and immutable essence. This kind of illusory existence known as māyā applies to everything and is the reason for all matter converging, forming, existing, disintegrating, and disappearing. Understanding this principle, which the Buddha called tathātā, helps us to understand that all things arise from interdependence and interaction. A core concern of the Buddha in putting forward this thesis was to break the caste system constructed by the Brahmin class and supported by a sweeping mythological narrative. In other words, the Buddha, in pointing out that nothing has an absolute and unchanging essence, made it clear that all living beings, including all species, are equal, and no distinctions can be made concerning blood, race, or culture.
Currently, however, following the empire’s successful establishment of illusory neoliberalism in most countries and regions, a new colonial order or new caste system has already taken shape in many societies. Take the income disparity between the rich and poor for example: As of 2023, the world’s top 81 billionaires─the rulers of the corporatocracy─control more wealth than 50% of the world combined, and wealth inequality continues to rise today.(1) During the pandemic, heavy reliance on the Internet exacerbated this wealth gap,(2) and simultaneously, under the enormous pressures caused by accelerationism and the subsequent fight for survival, the incidence of mental illness increased by twenty-five percent in 2020 alone according to a report published by the World Health Organization, thereby increasing the number of people suffering from mental illness to nearly one billion.(3)
The creation of this new colonial order and new caste system must involve an enormous transformation process, the core of which is the non-stop generation of new illusions that lure each new generation into the space of disorientation established by the empire.
Invoking the Buddhist concept of māyā in this era serves as a means of deconstructing new illusions, that is, it offers an alternative future perspective that posits the equality of all beings while deconstructing the empire’s view that normalizes the new colonial order and new caste system. This can also be applied to cultural and artistic production, which has the potential to point out various paths to equality, regardless of what form the production takes and whether its content is based in reality or fiction.
Images have always been central to the idea of illusion, and this is even more so the case recently due to developments in AI, which now has the ability to quickly generate images whose authenticity is impossible to determine. Three examples from history will be cited to support the perspective that images are not only about how they are recorded and produced by devices.
Example One: Bianwen and Sujiang Monks
Bianwen is a Tang Dynasty (618—907) literary form that evolved along with the spread of Buddhism from India to China. To facilitate understanding of esoteric sutras, Sujiang Monks transformed them into vernacular stories and then performed the stories for the common people. Transcriptions of these performances are called bianwen. By interpreting, translating, and rewriting scripture, Sujiang Monks were similar to modern-day performance artists who construct discursive fields. But to place these historical figures in contemporary society would be to reimagine or redefine their significance, as they would no longer be interpreters, translators, and rewriters of canonical theory, but rather more like deconstructionists chasing away the sorcery and illusions employed in the complex new control project undertaken by the empire, or like those who prompt everyone to imagine a different future.
Example Two: Lo-deh Sao
The origins of lo-deh sao are unclear, but it most likely began in the pre-industrial era, when farmers would sweep clean a spot in the village, perhaps under a tree, and perform simple operas during the fallow season. This form of cultural production organized for the amusement of the villagers was called lo-deh sao, meaning “to sweep the ground.” Lo-deh sao still has the power to inspire us today. By organizing this entertainment, farmers also became amateur performers taking on the identities of mythical figures or portraying characters of the opposite sex. Not only were they creating art during these performances, but more importantly, they were afforded an opportunity to transcend their identities; it might be said that the multiple identities of farmer, performer (artist), and mythical figure converged in one individual. Furthermore, in China’s history, these local self-organized theater performances often became vehicles for peasant uprisings.
Example Three: Bitai Thoan
During the Japanese colonial period (1895—1945), Chiang Wei-shui established the Taiwanese Cultural Association, which operated from 1921 to 1927. The association formed a traveling team of projectionists and silent film narrators known as Bitai Thoan in 1926. At the time it was common for Japanese police officers or firefighters to be seated in the last row of theaters run by local Taiwanese. Their purpose was to monitor film narrators and prevent them from advancing anti-colonial sentiment. These same narrators, however, would use Taiwanese dialect, slang, or sayings that only the local audience understood to deliberately create anti-colonial meaning in films where it had not existed before. The audience would laugh, applaud, cheer, and gesture when they heard these deliberately twisted interpretations.
The interaction between Bitai Thoan silent film narrators and their audience was a dialogic performance that both relied on images and went beyond them. This was especially so when the Japanese monitors left their seats overlooking the theater and stepped between the narrators and the audience to halt the interaction. At that point, the colonizers not only became visible to, and were encircled by, the audience, but also suddenly became the monitored under the gaze of the local people. Whether the Japanese police successfully thwarted interaction is less important than the fact that each was forced into a dual role of colonial oppressor and subject of scrutiny. The theater space intended for presenting films became the site of a role reversal between the monitor and the monitored, as well as a site where sound, image, dialog, theater, and cultural action came together to create a complex dialogical art field.
Following these connections, we might imagine that those audience members charged with subjective agency would, based on their own interpretations, retranslate, reimagine and re-narrate a film originally intended as colonial propaganda. And through the process of continuous retelling, they might have generated countless anti-colonial yaoyan films.(4)
The reason for focusing on these three examples is to suggest that, in this time when we are all subject to the empire’s pervasive control technology, contemporary filmmakers and video artists, can first of all follow the example of the Sujiang Monks and deconstruct the sorcery and illusions that the empire employs. The practice of cinematic production can also be like organizing lo-deh sao; laborers eliminated by automation, temporary contract workers controlled by algorithms, immaterial labor that is being replaced by AI, and those with dissenting opinions who have been forced to the margins can all gather together and construct a platform where they can create scenes, become performers, and make their voices heard. In this way, professional and amateur members of the production team can continually interact. The works they produce should fall somewhere between being silent and having sound, or may even be completely silent to leave room for both participating performers and active audience members to add their own imaginations and narrations. Like in the case of Bitai Thoan, where fluid relationships between silent films, narrators, and the audience were found, these contemporary films or videos would serve not merely as objects for observation, but also as catalysts prompting events that continually expand their significance. In other words, a film or a video can organically make connections among things, and thereby catalyze reconsiderations of our perceptual structures or restructure our societies.
Worn Away is the prologue of a long-term project titled Her and Her Children and is also one of several long-term works focused on mutual and self-rescue through “detoxifying illusion with māyā” under the new colonial order and new caste system.(5) The idea for the project was first inspired by Chen Chieh-jen’s family members, unemployed workers, and his friends who have been engaged in dissent for many years.
Introduction
The starting point for the video’s narrative is the fact that human society has entered a new Dark Age that appears magnificently beautiful on its surface. In the opening scene, an AI generated female voice issues from a smartphone, informing the unemployed, no longer creditworthy owner of the phone that he must immediately report to the Transit Area for processing because he failed to resume making payments after his grace period expired. Upon arriving in the Transit Area, which is surrounded by a chain-link fence and surveillance devices, the unemployed man sees a labyrinth of countless boxes for discarded people. Once he gets into his own box, strips of paper on which those already living in the Transit Area have narrated their experiences of becoming disposable subjects of human biological experiments reach his hands via a secret passageway connecting the maze of boxes. It is then revealed that in addition to the personal experiences of those unknown people, the papers also tell of how the corporatocracy fabricated various illusions to gradually force the majority of human society into hopeless circumstances. Next, an AI generated female voice is heard announcing that those wishing to participate in the Optimization of Biological Function Assistance Program in return for life-sustaining supplies can board a special vehicle that is arriving in ten minutes and headed for the laboratory. After everyone gathers in the square to wait for the vehicle, a comatose woman slumped in a chair suddenly falls to the ground, and then under everyone’s silent gaze, a classical nanguan song seems to emanate from her mouth. The crowd then forms a circle and walks around her seemingly in mourning, as she murmurs the lyrics, “All beings have forever been trapped by illusion” and “By not grasping at absolute essence, one can be liberated from illusions.” The entire scene, including the anonymous people, then disappears, leaving only these two atomized individuals─a comatose woman and newly arrived unemployed man─looking completely isolated under stark theatrical lighting, yet joined into one by their common plight.
From his experience of this illusory process, the newly arrived unemployed man seems to understand how the useless, discarded people have used small actions to rebuild their subjectivity in this inescapable world. It is through the śūnyatā awareness technique, derived from Buddhism, that they are able to qualitatively transform the corporatocracy’s paradise control technique.
Notes
- See https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2023-01/Survival%20of%20the%20Richest%20Full%20Report%20-English.pdf [Accessed May 10, 2024]
- See https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621477/bp-survival-of-the-richest-160123-en.pdf [Accessed May 10, 2024]
- See https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240049338 [Accessed May 10, 2024]
- The Chinese term yaoyan originally referred to sayings or rhymes circulating in society that were critical of the government. Yaoyan was a strategy relying on poetic language, songs, and fabricated narratives to disrupt authorial mechanisms and comment on social issues. As a result, it produced points of view and social imaginaries that deviated from official narratives.
- The first chapter of Her and Her Children, the video A Field of Non-Field, was completed in 2017.
- Installation view photographed by Hao YANG.