About multimedia art
(from a letter to Jean-Luc Nancy)

 

I don't see multimedia art as an artistic genre, rather a way of being, thinking, seeing and behaving. It's an open gesture, an indeterminate domain, a pluralistic manner of seeing, in other words, a formless mode of approach based on a diversification of sites, prospects, languages and techniques. It's the "movement of thought" or movement simple, its tracing. A Stroke of the Brush, the step. It ignores forms, distinctions, hierarchies yet has the capacity to change indefinitely and includes all domains and times simultaneously. This is why I like to call it "Open media".

There is a displacement of meaning based among other things on the movement of dissolve of the distinction subject (self)/object (world), or inside/outside, with blurred, indistinct, even slippery limits. So that makes it difficult to consider a pairing "soul:body"..., rather the surface of the skin, the outer limit of self and world. It doesn't make sense to see the work as "genuine expression of self", since it doesn't rest on anything except the work itself, its capacity to be Nothing, its sheer experiencing, its sheer experimenting of the thing itself, in the here and now. It is impersonal, contextual.

So there is no idea, no picture, no man, just the work resulting from a microscopic vision, in which everything turns up fragmented, both singular and plural. It enjoys paradox and doesn't have any set rule, so that everything is both possible and impossible, just like our lives. Similarly, the triviality and ordinariness of our everyday gestures, no matter how small and insignificant they may appear, are endowed with meaning as "forms of life" and take part in a "language game".

I would even go further and say that my work stands where there is neither past nor future, which is exactly why I feel it is the site of possibles, because of its capacity for information, for starting all over again indefinitely. It is a mere "passing place", that momentary and transient utopia, Guy Debord's "paradoxical utopia emancipating all future".

To put it differently, it is "Beginning itself", the inchoative, putting at stake the meaning of the world every moment it appears. This is what I call "Zero Time", which is in Lin Shi's phrase "the crossroads of confusion" of all times and in Chuang Tseu's view the "fundamental liberty" (Chaos) in which you can be reborn again and again every instant in all imaginable forms or non-forms.

Isn't all art in fact, from the steps of wild beasts in the cave of Lascaux to the insipid landscapes of Ni Chan, based exactly on this instance of man's withdrawal as well as that of ideas or pictures ? As you remarked in your The Vestige of Art, let "art be its own trace" and "the step mark the rhythm of the visible with invisible".

Then again the question is : What, if any, is the difference between the "step of the wild beasts in the cave of Lascaux" and the multimedia work, taken this time in the narrow sense of multimedia as a synthetic work, digital or virtual ?