Critical Reflection
Is the "naked me" just an illusion that I'm wearing the right clothes at the right time and I'm mistakenly thinking that it's me?"
If one continues to follow this line of reasoning,
"Is my skin - and the subject of the life it extends - also clothing?"
"Are my muscles a second layer of clothing that I wear, either physically or mentally? What about the internal organs? And by analogy, is what constitutes what I am just layer after layer of structures nested within each other? Does the real me exist within the cracks of the structure, or is it a void?"
These were the questions I threw at myself at the beginning of Naked, questions that haunted me for so long that for a while I lost the desire to create. But as I attempted to confront the state itself that Naked presents, these questions - which are of course timeless - began to reveal a deeper source. In the layers of narratives that make up my own, a contrast begins to emerge, and the relationship between the individual and the group gradually blurs from a binary opposition to the other. "Identity" and the "context of defining identity" that it entails began to enter my research field. I began to look for a reconciliation of the problem in terms of 'identity negotiation, the relationship between individual perception and group environment'.I have centred my problem solving on the negotiation of identity, the relationship between individual cognition and the group environment.
First of all I tried to find the context in which I was myself. Because at this point I believe that the reason why people have a social identity is not just a confirmation of a social status quo, but that everyone naturally needs to have it.
When I reflect on my own experience of life, when I ask myself the question of my identity, I am in the midst of an awareness of the multiple social identities that I have been caught up in as a result of the changes in my social identity.The 'clothes' that I reject have actually always existed, but now they have revealed themselves because of the changing circumstances of my life and spiritual environment. Part of this change in environment comes from the change in my status as a student, part from the change in the environment in which I study, and from there, from the change in the cultural environment, from the change in social requirements, etc. The idea of community points to different criteria of distribution on different scales, never having a fixed definition, but seemingly only showing commonalities in the 'plural form'.
At the same time, however, this group pressure, independent of any clear-cut categorisation, becomes a partly chaotic individual, overriding my self-awareness and becoming a shadow within me. When I refer to the unnaturalness of the notion of 'I', I do not point to the effect of a multiplicity of forces working together, but to a contrast with the notion of the purely 'real'. It follows that in my perception, the individual and the group are both 'singular forms', pure contrasts, not illusions of some complex effect.
After thinking about the above, I came to the conclusion that the most suitable vehicle of expression for my work should be some kind of biological material that carries the awareness of life, and at the same time must meet the requirement of "forming a complex ecology, each with its own independent life, but also evolving as a product of life above any individual under the symbiotic effect of the group". After much searching, I decided to use a mixture of fungi, moulds and the not-single species of kombucha as the material basis for Naked.
The natural complexity of fungus material, the subtle demands on the living environment and the wild growth of multiple populations in a mixed state, more appropriately expresses the chaotic nature of the group I have in mind. In the cultivation of fungus material, it is difficult to divorce the multiple species from each other, even to the extent of producing nutrients for each other's survival and being bound by each other's modified environment, which in turn evolves its own state of existence, and it has become difficult to distinguish between self and environment. At the same time, a membrane-like product begins to be secreted in the collective, each individual fungus becomes part of the secreted membrane-like product, which in turn forms a separate entity, a symbol of "barrier", a kind of hazy vision barrier in the optical environment, just like the one I experienced in my mind during the process of self-reflection The "barrier that words cannot cross".
I want to use naturally occurring kombucha as the material for my internal 'clothes' and mixed fungus as the content for my 'skeleton', thus showing the tension between individual identity and group definition.
Looking at the work Naked, I think I have given my own more satisfactory answer for the time being, or rather, shown the problem clearly enough - they may have been one and the same thing in the first place.
The work itself, Naked, can be viewed from two perspectives, I think, either as the 'absence of the protagonist' or as a portrait.
