this year i have survived by creating stories, both my own and listening to other people’s. What is love? I feel like love is coming full circle, it is coming from whence we were before. Love is about making the effort to show up, with no guarantee that it will returned. I wanted to create art last year in order to make it through the dark times, and last year was some of the darkest times I’d ever experienced. I don’t know how I got through it except I had an army behind me. My family in Beijing didn’t help, and it doesn’t matter that they were grieving too. I felt like I was guided all this time, with many, many people standing next to me, guiding me.
Maybe it was that they saw me hurting myself on purpose. Maybe it was the shame, but a lot of it was definitely the self-harm. Perhaps what I was giving out was the sense that I wasn’t home. Someone had left the building. This homelessness resonated with many people. And they wanted to save me. Saving is a difficult task, but one worth doing– in their own ways they were also creating a shared vision, or project, with me, because they knew I sorely needed it. To remain the same, to remain calm, to remain myself.
Thank you and not, auf wiedersehen, 2023.