黃佳淳
Door Work, 2025
Director: zhuyan ye
Writer: Setven Hou, Sage Lin, Yuqi Weng
Text reader: Steven Hou, Hûn-tshim Lí, Sage Lin, Yuqi Weng
Door performer: Maria Plotnikova, Zachary Sun, Mue Wu
Violin: Ray Madrigal
Video documentation: Claire Staples
Photo documentation: Ji Yang
This work existed only because of all my collaborators. I am indebted to all of them for their brilliance and patience.
“My struggle with language is its inadequacy to describe a knowledge almost incomprehensible.
My struggle with meaning is that as I am putting the words down their meaning keeps changing.”*
I started making this work because I found the letter I wrote my psychoanalyst during the onset of my second (psychotic) episode. At the time, words were starting to fail me but paradoxically I tried to capture the exact failure through writing. What I mean by failing is that experiences were exceeding the bounds of my language. How does one say the unsayable precisely? And the result was the letter Hûn-tshim read during the performance. In hindsight, I was surprised by the coherence of the letter, apparently I was more organized than I thought. And my surprise became something of a starting point for the making of Door Work.
Something about the title Door Work. It was spring 2022 and I was traveling in Lisbon with my siblings, I was already psychotic at the time. Everything was pregnant with metaphors and I couldn't help but keep assigning meanings to my surroundings. On our way to the airport back to London (where my siblings reside,) I saw a car passed by with Door Work written at the back of the car. It was a cosmic revelation, I thought, that was it. What I was experiencing is precisely my door work. How to open the door and how to close it, sometimes leaving it ajar. Openings, closings, and boundaries become sites of tension, passage, and collapse.
For the door part I roll the dice to decide the score. A question of how to move where. And the violin was added at this point to cue the door movements. As for my movements, zhuyan came up with the majority of it.
For the text part I provided my letter and ten images which include some photos and drawings I made during my episodes. zhuyan and I then invited three writers: Sage, Steven, and Yuqi to respond to the materials, each with a three-minute text. What was being read by each person were written by themselves. With the exception of Hûn-tshim, who was reading my letter and my analyst's response.
Door Work is a starting point of my ongoing investigation of the tension between language and reality. How language both constructs and fail to contain experiences. And the possibility of creativity to invent new realities. I have an intuition I couldn't yet articulate, but I am excited about what is to come.
*written during my first episode