Individual Research Project: Rain Duplicate
Final Project of Royal College of Art MA Visual Communication
2023 Tokyo TDC 提名奖 Nominee Works
2023 Award 360° 年度实验出版 Annual Experimental Publishing
2023 Award 360° 年度实验出版 Annual Experimental Publishing
‘Leaving the river after a rain, and becoming a forgotten puddle.’
Rain Duplicate is a publication with an object catalogue as the main visual format. It was inspired by my experience of struggling to return home at the beginning of the pandemic. I try to relate to the ‘site-publishing’ methodology of my previous ‘Go to the River’ project by using the conceptual but more local and intimate site a ‘puddle’ as a visual metaphor and narrative thread, using myself as a counter-narrative object to be dissected. Objects around me are categorised by different identities in one person, becoming symbols of intimated stories, to record the private and intimate dull pains hidden behind abstract concepts and data in a fragmented way.
Puddles are temporary and hidden. No one will remember the difference between puddles left after the last rain and those left by the current one. They serve as several remnant duplications of what the rain left behind, briefly and repeatedly profiling the world in their mirror reflection. A person as a kind of counter-narrative, the temporary, disposable objects he carries with him, which cannot be called biographies or documents but can profile some part of his life from a particularly vivid perspective.
Puddles are bloodstains, scars that dry up. No one can define temporary and eternal because they are all relatively large puddles that have created the illusion of lakes and rivers at the sight of other smaller puddles, but which must eventually dry up. One’s life is a series of puddles after the rain ends. Countless small puddles accumulate into a depression, like the only chair in a rented house, briefly and repeatedly taking on many small narratives: computers and books stuck between clothes, shirts crumpled into a cabbage, half-drunk bottles of mineral water, the pain that remains after an overworked day sitting directly on top of clutter, all discarded with the withdrawal of the rent.
This publication synthesises my experience of self-publishing practice to visually investigate and ask questions about the narrative form of self-publishing: do self-publications nowadays need some counternarrative? In what way should small, intimate and local stories be recorded? Are the inevitable errors of such visual retellings able to convey some kind of emotional atmosphere to the reader?
In the project, I presuppose a female character based on myself. ‘Her’ life is made up of countless catalogues of objects like these, she is a ‘momentary and transparent organism’ (Nabokov). If a series of insignificant events can be recorded, her life can be honestly reproduced, and when we perceive the source document through a copy of the rain, the long loneliness finally shines through the darkness, and the vague content behind the grand slogans can finally be painted into a clearer shape, thus proving the value and possibility of this kind of retelling—This is what I hope to achieve through this project.
