From farewell to longing.
The beauty of missingness through time, space, and memories.
This project focuses on the feeling of loss and longing, and the absence of something, someone, or some place that no longer exists.
The feeling, in only a brief moment, shows up and fades away as if it had never existed. Leaving behind only emptiness making us inquire at times if that moment really existed or if we are just making our way to fill in the blank while the blank itself is truly the truth.
‘Time is the moving image of reality’
—Plato
Time marches on, so does reality. No matter how hard or how carefully we try to capture each moment in our life, Time still moves. And as it moves it takes the image of the reality with it. As said by Heraclitus:
‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river
and he’s not the same man.’
Tells us how we can never experience reality twice but reality can’t be reality without changing. Time makes us sentimental, even makes us suffer, of how we can’t re-experience reality. We can not travel back to the same spot to look at the place on the exact spot of time to feel the same as we used to to the place on the situation with the exact person at the time. That’s how our memory works its way to capture the moment and replay it in our mind again and again yet never the same. It leads us further and further from our own memory yet it creates memory. Since everything always change, we, who try to hold tightly on something that had happened before, need memory as our carrier and willingly to pay only to let our love and bittersweet feeling remain, and to let ourselves sink into the illusion for a short while. In the end, it will remind us of how we lose it and how uncertain and fragile it is. And once in a while, it will show us the fact that nothing can ever last forever. Once we lose it, we lose it for good.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes…”
— Madeleine L’Engle