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). This painting displays 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 relative 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. I snap away on long exposures to catch abstract movements and light refractions. Whatever falls in front of the lens. 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:
1 https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/collection/objects/fun-facts-20121052/, last accessed 31/05/2025
2 Wang references the didactic science boards from his childhood visits to the Beijing Zoo, as well as their historical role in state propaganda.