Your Earnest Fondle
Offset-printing on wood-free paper, string-binding, 704pp.
Yasmine (or Siming, the surrogate of my agony) blames the reason she couldn't be an idol on her hands. Genetics dictated that her hands could never be soft, but rather like steep cliffs, ravines across. She could not imagine how such biological features could ever become the vessel of love and care, so she could only suppress her dream of being an idol, living as an average person. This time, she (I) browsed her iCloud album—an archive of over 101 thousand images collected from 2013 to the present—and selected 672 images of her hands to turn them into a dictionary of her life experience.
This work was initially installed in a truck exhibition that took place in front of the Sham Shui Po street market. Local residents were invited to enter the truck and interact with selected pieces. Unable to return to Hong Kong due to the pandemic, I chose to create this 700-page dictionary as my embodiment and invited the audience to look through, caress, and fondle all my pains as if holding a hand-shaking event.
* Commissioned by Virtual Village, Glory Hole 活體洞
思明在对外解释的时候喜欢说，她最终没有成为偶像的原因是她的手。基因决定了她的手无法变得柔若无骨，是丹霞地貌般的奇观。她没有办法想象这样的生物信息，能够如何成为传递爱与关怀的介质，故只能压抑着，默默作为普通人的一员生活着，对外隐藏“成为偶像”这种不足与外人道的愿望。这一次，她（我）遍历了2013至今的十万张iCloud照片，收集了约672张包含了自己的手的特写图片，代替无法回到香港的我参加在深水埗解释前举行的“卡车展览”，邀请街坊参观、抚摸，所有的生物化的苦痛，像是召开我永远无法实现的握手会一样。
* 相关散文首发于SAMPLE
