When I was a child, my family took many many road trips in the summer. To entertain myself during those long, seemingly endless treks, I built myself a play world inside a cardboard box (long before the virtual realms so prevalent now had become a reality). The possibilities for long, winding, and never-ending stories as well as the stories that flashed up in the sun and then dissolved as we drove through the heat grew and multiplied.
These childhood experiences trained me for what was to come: to see stories as framed in space, as though on stage.
These continually unfolding stories also taught me that storytelling is a matter of perspective. Where I sat as a crouched in the back of the car and peered into that magical cardboard box allowed me range and variation to my stories. These characters were my partners in an unspoken crime: the reality behind which I was hiding was not the only one. There are other worlds to be seen and heard and for now, I had the power to make them as I saw fit.
I have watched these stories from afar, or at times dreamed them before they have taken form on a moving stage.
Our first position provides us the initial window onto all these tales as they unfold.
But even from that point of stillness, as we take up a relationship to these stories that give, we find ourselves changing just as the stories themselves transform…taking up new and surprising twists and turns of the stories that bend with the flow of the road.
Boxes as the containers of the past, present, and future appear repeatedly in artworks.
In Sounding Bodies: Light, Image, and Empty Spaces (May 7-9, 2021, Jao Tsung-I Academy, Kowloon, Hong Kong), Earth Boxes came to hold as many secrets as they reveal.
