Fractured
2025
Animation, Text
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Apropos of my girlfriend, I’ve developed a deeper appreciation for classical music. I gravitate towards anything in a minor key and prefer contemplative works to large orchestral processions. Music that doesn’t announce itself but instead feels like someone thinking.
I had a complicated relationship with learning the piano when I was young, sitting somewhere between obligation and resistance. Conversely, my girlfriend, who taught piano, had a healthier relationship with the instrument. Sometimes, I think about her younger self, practising for hours, pressing the keys as if she were asking them questions.
When I attend recitals, I watch the interplay between the musicians and observe their idiosyncrasies. Other times, I let my thoughts drift. For some compositions, I close my eyes to better hear the phases of the notes, their attack, decay, and release, a small architecture of sound unfolding in time.
This series comes from that same quiet curiosity. It was also inspired by Wang Wei’s Fun Facts1 (2011), a painting displaying three discrete images: a pair of red pandas, a tiger, or the Simplified Chinese rendering of ‘Fun Facts’, depending on the viewer’s spatial position to it.2 My question: What happens when you take something still and begin to ask it questions, splitting it, rotating it, moving it, fracturing it in a prismatic way?
I usually take photos with my eyes open, pointing the camera with intent. Other times, I don’t set out to frame any particular subject. Free of a tripod, I take snapshots using long exposures that catch abstract movements and light refractions. Whatever falls in front of the lens—photographic found objects driven by a form of chance operation. Some things you hear better with your eyes closed. Some things you see more clearly when you stop trying to look.
Maybe that’s all I’m doing: tuning in, tracing outlines, and trying not to miss the quiet parts.
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Footnotes:
- https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/collection/objects/fun-facts-20121052/, last accessed 31/05/2025
- Wang was, in part, inspired by the natural science bulletin boards he saw during childhood visits to the zoo.