Shizhe Qian
Butler troubled me, and I troubled us
Shizhe Qian & Jiajing Lu
My first encounter with Judith Butler’s book was in last summer. Their doctrine of gender comforts me, and also, it troubles me. Most of my previous romantic relationships ended unpleasantly for I always forced myself to be/act as a perfect boyfriend like any protagonist in the 90s’ Hongkong Kung Fu movie. And meanwhile, I expected the other one to be an ideal girl accordingly. The new perspective of gender from Butler makes me reconcile with my past through the understanding of masculinity and heterosexual desire as a social and cultural construction. However, it also drags me to a confusion where I have to face the contingency and constructedness of my current, satisfactory relationship with the one I have felt most comfortable with for many years. Looking for an “answer”, I undertook a photographic exploration of myself, whereas till the “end”, the answer is not found in me but in us.
3.26-3.27, 23 hours in Cologne
If we accept that time is linear, could we also admit time is subjective?
We have created devices to measure and indicate “our” time, subjecting our behavior to the regularity of time as well, but is there any existence outside our frame of time? Spending one day in a hotel room in Cologne, I isolated myself to measure the so-called objectivity of time and visualized it, while in such a temporal place where travelers are regulated by check-in and check-out, an existence beyond the time was presented.
