Shun, a young artist currently based in the UK and mainland China, graduated from Goldsmiths College in London as a Master of Arts. She started her artistic practice from video installation in 2017, before that, she had worked in the Center for Visual Studies (CVS) in Peking University from 2013-2015 as a research assistant, and her later artistic practice has always been driven by research and philosophy theoretical base.
In London, she has participated in Slade (UCL) summer school group show and screened her latest short film at Goldsmiths Curzon Cinema last September. The upcoming project would be the multi-site collaborative event "Cooltsalon #3' presented in May, across London, Sofia, and Belgrade.
"Outsideness" and "alternative possibility" are the main theme of her current work, the concern for psychoanalysis theory, (anti-)Anthropocene and post-human circumstance are the strategies she used to approach to it. As an emerging artist and filmmaker, her educational background in contemporary art and the mixed culture environment she lives in has always been inspiring her to explore different possibilities of visual expression and perception.
创伤是裂口,它指引着我并作为一种通径引导我通向另一种可能性和“之外”世界。对创伤的关注从来都不只是一种解决问题的工具,而被仅仅认为是只能限制于个案研究的范畴中;它实际上指向了一种更为普遍、更为根本的关于冲突、介入和存在的机制,其与有机体和无机体都紧密相关。然而,关于创伤经历的案例研究也是具有重要意义的,这是原型构建过程中不可或缺的第一手信息来源。弗洛伊德的文章,超越享乐原则(Beyond the Pleasure Principle),深刻地塑造了我对于创伤的认识;他关于有机体是如何对外界刺激作出反应的假设带出了关于“囊(vesicle)”的比喻,以及更为重要的,保守性本能的原则以及趋于恢复到早先状态的倾向性。“囊”这一原型进一步地催化了我对于拓扑学和图示的兴趣,这引向了一个视觉化和抽象化的方向。而后者,弗洛伊德的分析中最为基本的原则,它超越了对享乐的需求,并导致了对于重复的强迫冲动,它促使我更深入地审视创伤经历,尤其是由它所引发的感知和精神上的紊乱;从某种意义上说,在这种紊乱中,我窥见到了一种含糊不明的可能性,它向我喃喃低语,令人不安而震颤地低语着一种能够脱离时序叙述逻辑和主导性现实的途经。
Trauma is the breach, it guides me and functions as an approach for me to the alternative possibility and the Outside. The concern about trauma has never been just a problem-solving tool which only can be suggested to stay within the study of individual cases; it actually points to a more general, more radical mechanism about conflict, irruption, and existence, which relates to both the organism and the inorganics. However, the case study about traumatic experiences is also significant, it serves as an indispensable first-hand information source for the prototype building process. Freud’s writing, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, has profoundly shaped my perspective about trauma; his hypothesis about how the organism reacts to the external stimuli brings the metaphor of “vesicle”, and more importantly, the principle of conservative instincts and the tendency to restoring to the earlier state. The “vesicle” prototype has further catalyzed my interests in topology and diagrams, which leads to a visualized and abstract direction. And the latter, the most fundamental principle in Freud’s analysis, which beyond the needs of pleasure and leads to the compulsion to repeat, it pushed me to look deeper into the traumatic experience, especially the sensory and the mental disorder aroused by it; in some sense, within this disorder, I had an ambiguous glimpse of a kind of possibility which keeps whispering to me, disturbingly and thrillingly, about a way of detaching from the chronological narrative logic and the dominant reality.
From a perspective of the system, René Thom’s Catastrophe Theory provided a more general and objective description of the non-continuity structure and the impact caused by unpredictable changes—which could be juxtaposed with Freud’s words about the traumatic reaction caused by unbearable stimulations. A simplified version of Catastrophe Theory’s system can be expressed as the broken process of glass: a glass placed on a table, then it is pushed down from this table and falls into pieces on the ground—from an unbroken glass to the pieces on the ground, this is one stable status transforms into another stable status, while between these two kinds of stable there is a complete unstable status which is the falling process of this glass. The unstable status presents itself as a curve of the original smooth stable surface, it also can be seemed like a collapse according to different extents of the changes. Catastrophe Theory is an inspiring theoretical model especially for the uncontinuity and the instability, however, for the traumatic impact, the unstable collapse still yearns for more twisted gazing and distorted imagination.
Back to a fundamental point of view, our memory is asynchronous data recording process of the reality, when the unpredictable and unbearable change happens, the external information flow produced by the reality will collapse on this recording process, break through the operation order of it, then causes system error. This error node contains enormous energy from both the external irruption and the interruption of the original process, then energy keeps gathering, and building up finally forms a spinning core that has extreme density and mass—just like a black hole. Furthermore, this error node does not only bring disruptive influences to where the change happens, due to the mass of this black hole vortex, but it would also produce immense gravity force which is able to generate radiative impact to the following process—and this is exactly how the obsessional reminiscence happens among the PTSD cases.
The mechanism of obsessional reminiscence is multi-stratified and anti-chronological distributed. The core of this multi-stratified memory structure would always be the trauma, which originally comes from the outside; it brings overwhelming impact to trigger off the stress response and self-protection of the memory process, the latter would try to bind the traumatic stimuli by wrapping it layer by layer—returning to the same place that you actually have never left again and again, under the guidance of the black hole—till all the layers tangle and intertwine with each other, a Möbius is built. In this sense, the catastrophe curve is the Möbius twist, it actually opens a threshold to a broader reality; through this threshold, we can simultaneously be static and volatile, systematic, and chaotic, here and there, now and don’t-know-when.
Looking deeper into the trauma is essential for every being, it has never been just an issue of psychoanalysis, it is an approach for re-evaluating everything. In the vast majority of circumstances, we tend to presume that only the stable status needs our attention—an unbroken glass has the value in use, and the broken pieces need to be dealt with. We are the cephalization creatures who are developed to the only face forward, meanwhile our social production also further compresses our horizon by unceasingly posing demands for consumption into the future. Machines for production are designed for overheated not for inexplicable shutdown, this makes them inherently antagonistic to individual mental disorder, and this trend even has been increasingly intensified under the context of the Anthropocene. Therefore, we need something beyond the Catastrophe Theory model, we need to keep every wound fresh and take it as a breach to unfold the unstable curve. There is so much more happened before the glass broke—the primary separation between the organism and the inorganics, the phosphorescence fire that comes from the past keeps burning under the crust—we need to jump into the black hole vortex to see all that.