Your reaction makes me. My action makes you.

When we went to the Yangtze River to take photos.

title : Your reaction makes me. My action makes you.
material : video, photo, etc.
year : 2017-2019

A video recording the conversation. A part of Chinese that I don’t understand are shown in subtitles. Subtitles show that it is a non-verbal dialogue. It uses the same technique as previously my artwork “Limited Words and Capture of the Toilet”.

A double-exposure photo produced by me and him taking two shutter releases.

This project is a collective term for records created through communication with young people I met in Chongqing, China.

In the video, the exchange of words through activities such as making a chair, drawing, eating corn, playing Chinese chess, going to the Yangtze River is expressed in subtitles. Apart from recording dialogues in video, there was also a project to take double-exposure photos together. In the exhibition, it is expressed using various media such as video, photos, and text.

This guy is left behind both economically and politically, and in a general way of understanding it is homeless. I think I can’t catch him with the word homeless, and I think I can’t know him if I feel like I have generalized and understood it with the word homeless. I and him are different in nationality and native language. Through this kind of dialogue, I tried to discover new words and how to create relationships. Rethinking the function of words is what this work is trying to make. I want to change the function of human thinking and language, which is generalized and easy to understand.

There is also a question about the privileged part of the art of how you can approach others. In other words, there is a difference between him and me as the subject and the artist. This leads to some sort of violence that can be taken as an act of cutting his life. The title “Your reaction makes me, my actions make you” thinks that it’s just one way to solve them.

2018 『Local Prospects4』( Artium / Fukuoka ) Exhibition view


Catalog of the exhibition held in Altium

A text and a picture of what when I met him one year after the project.
Digest edition