RISD Graduate Thesis – Molding Life Installation 2014
Our physical bodies are limited and impermanent. In humanity, I observe a universal desire to transcend these limitations. But our senses are boundless, rich and even immortal. Our senses are the extension of our physical bodies. The smell, touch and impression you left to people could affect them for a long period of time or even their whole life. And also how human senses themselves and the nature? how developing technologies changed human existence? In our day-to-day existence, we often send information out in multiple ways which we may not noticed, we affect other lives, and others effect us in the same ways.
I have been exploring the effect of physical touch since 2012. Thinking about 30 years ago, we exchanged information and expressed emotions by face-to-face chatting or writing letters. We cherished every possibility of communication and connection with others. Nowadays, global internet makes everything so fast and so easy. We don’t appreciate the connection, and we don’t have deep contact with others anymore. Physical contact, however, is one of the most effective way of communication. Even though we used to be so familiar with touch as we were with breathing, it’s often downplayed or disregarded even within such fields as the history of the body or the history of medicine. Human skin is the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient protector. Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose and mouth, is the mother of senses. Each owner of a human body necessarily bound up in the physical. For me, the most exciting aspect of touch is that touch is so broadly related to our culture, history, individual personality, human community, sensitive feelings, humanity, sociology, psychology emotions, biological effects, and our relationship with other species, etc.. I see touch not only as a special form of meaningful language, connection, and interaction, but also a representation of the human being, which effects profoundly in human society and the larger world.
