Rather than amplify the making, I aim to minimize my making technique and focus instead on the underside of the relation between artwork and artist. I focus on the process of assembling several things into a constellation of actors and this requires a balancing act between nonhuman and human actors. The resulting performative assemblages also require me to nurture a different set of relationships. This entails a notion of balance and, as opposed to forcing things together through binding, nailing, drilling or gluing materials, I enable the things to enact their own forces on each other.

On reflection, my background history has informed a subconscious intent for the self-dissolution of my authorship or presence due to my childhood experiences. Throughout my childhood in Taiwan, I was taught by social structures to become a good and obedient citizen. This has caused me to live in a way in which I consider my personality (sense of self) as less important than the well-being of society. For example, in my high school, the class was considered to be a totality rather than a selection of individuals; we were a collective or whole. Each student in the class had to behave well so that the whole class of students (each a supplement of the other) could be imbued with the status of the best class in the whole school (a well-oiled machine). I became an ‘object’ (student/number) that was not myself, which minimized me into a material reality. This made me consider my ‘thinghood’ (or essence/self) and how that can be brought out within a system that tries to identify, name and minimize. This happens similarly in society’s relationship with objects, as humans tend to force them to execute their presumed function only. Therefore, I feel a connection to the objects that I collect and try to return to their ‘thinghood’. An attempt to assert a space or arrangement in which they can self-represent.

In my practice, I continue to erase my identity subconsciously. I am used to battling between individualism and collectivism in my mind and, most of the time, I am living in a situation in which I prioritize the group over the self. In responding to this, I aim to withdraw my overdetermination of the object from the materials that I deploy, in order to avoid my human authority over things. This enables the thing to self-present and the viewer to communicate with the material based on the thing’s terms and the viewer’s own experience.

In my practice, there is no permanent form and no traditional pronouncement of when an assemblage actually performs as an artwork. This is because my work usually acts silently in the gallery and is often ignored. For example, as an experiment I placed a spoon purposefully in the corner of a restaurant (Bao Fitzrovia, 11. November.2019) but, when sitting in the restaurant, customers barely noticed the intention of this act. The spoon is activated as an artwork if the viewer notices that there is a different framing, or the spoon remains just a spoon. This relates to Not Really Really (17-SS-4) because, although it is set in a gallery and is framed as having material intent, the egg yolk often remains unobserved. In correlation with this, Not Really Really (17-SS-4) becomes an artwork if framed and interpreted by the viewer as such.