Since 2007, conveying meaning beyond object and text began to emerge as one of my major artistic interests. My methods have been various and have included painting, drawing, installation, text annotation, and even jewelry making. Using a wide breath of methods and materials has allowed me to play with my identity and position as an artist. I have pretended to be an excavator, an archeologist, and a recorder at the same time in a fictional encyclopedia excavation project (in 2004), and as a person who fell in love with an unknown species of tropical fish at the Breeding Guppy Project in 2007. After I began my master’s degree, I created another persona for myself, as a fish trainer who had a passion for training tropical fish. After this, I found the imaginary character of “Mr. Wilson” for a museum project. The character of Mr. Wilson was a donor and collector for a local museum, where he was considered to be a 19th century Anglo-Saxon expert. This name references the personified volleyball from the movie Cast Away, and also David Hildebrand Wilson who created “The Museum of Jurassic Technology”. In this context, naming my character “Mr. Wilson” has direct implications for meta-museum playing.
Through these projects my interest in positioning and fabricating stories continues to grow into imaginary characters, fictional journeys beyond reality, animals and ‘being-animal’, which culminates in an exploration of death and life. Through this positioning play as an artist, I started to concern myself more with the relationship between objects and gestures such as rebuilding contexts and meanings through site-specific approaches and also considering meta-space and meta-object as hypertext; which offers chances to go into space and story beyond space and object. My current interest is heading towards making space an embodied object: such as a book as an object that has a door and window for starting a journey beyond it.
In the spring of 2009, I began my first project involving the ideas of “preserving death and the shapes of living things”, in the city of Champaign, Illinois, a semi-rural college town home to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was an installation work in the Champaign County Historical Museum, as a part of my study about a site-specific approach incorporating a methodological view. I had a chance to exhibit the “Wilson collection”, which is a fake collection combined with an actual museum collection. This collection included Victorian-style moss terrariums, which reference the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, and miniature terrariums which have an abridged nature to reflect real nature. They are constructed of slivers of cubic rings made from dead fish and flash, and include a dead fish collection in resin, skins of animals, papers and holed hamburger patties coated with resin after having been eaten by ants, and animal porcelain collections which reference ancient Chinese taxonomy in the fiction of Borges as discussed by Foucault. This exhibition was the first work that allowed to me to bring to the foreground my central issues: archaeology and taxonomy, history and fictions, the function of the museum, collections as evidence of fiction, interest in positioning and gesture, being-something or someone, death and life, and finally, “things” and names. Playing with context and naming, using moss to represent nature and capturing nature in the miniature terrariums gave me a chance to experience the relationships between language and things, truth and fiction, and death and life.
