missing face
A Thousand Souls
The idea of the single soul is the basis of Western religion and society. It is the source of our individuality and our desire. And the portrait defines this self, by exposing the soul through a clarity of vision. We feel we can sense the texture of this soul through the details and subtleties of the subject’s expression and manner.
“In reality however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.” – Herman Hesse (The Steppenwolf)
We can instead conceive of the soul as a composite of thousands of disparate souls, extracted by circumstance and reaction. This series seeks to shed light on this great expanse within us, beyond what we aim and hope to be seen as, and into the far reaches of our psyche, dark corners unknown to us until the very moment they emerge.
Erasure revolves around my aged parents and parents-in-law in their seventies and their photographs taken during a family trip to Tokyo several years ago. The series title refers to my painstaking act of fading their images from the photographs with an ink eraser as a graphic portrayal of how life quietly empties itself from them. The resulting faint images becomes an urgent testimony of their slowly fading existence from this world, as well as from my life. Ironically, they are resurrected in my emotional space as reawakened memories by the very act of erasure - at once emotionally torment and intimate. Despite the joyous association of a holiday destination, this work speaks of my own uneasy anticipation of their final destination - death.
This dread extends even to the contemplation of my own death. Their fast aging faces become a reflection and questioning of my own mortality - a question I first asked myself many years ago as a child of four: what will happen to me when my parents die? This thought haunts me till this day