Amaya Shen

To look at art, for me, is to dive into oneself: to look closely at my interior lining (I imagine my soul as folds of brocade and at turns silk; compressing, flowing free and wide –then twisting taut as a wire string) to scratch at who I am, how I was made, and also through that, how the world is stitched together through my folds.

plaintively: i return again, and again, to mediums of art, writing and cinema because as I learn more about myself, I learn more about others, about the world, and vice versa. And is there anything more evasive than that experience outside of ourselves? Is it not living life viewed through a single slat just so tilted that you may peer a dodgy eye out?

Again: I am obssessed with being able to feel outside of myself. To understand the different turns and variation of life that goes on. It is appalling to me, that so many lives are lived out quietly, with hope or none, love or indiference, wisdom or ignorance, Truth or absent justice….and I may never know such individual triumphs. Or at least, commit to memory their sufferings. I am attached –in fact anchored –to this unnamed emotion or need: that I want people to know they are not alone, that they are thought of, that I have you in my heart; that although I don’t know you, I may know of you….

Immanuel Kant’s ethics is at its most basic level grounded in an understanding of humans as essentially limited creatures: we are contingent beings. As such, he comes up with this deontological ethics of the categorical imperative (which truly, leads one to wild scenarios i.e. strictly never being able to lie and therefore telling a homocidal maniac where his victim is with full knowledge! I conclude: rule deontology is amusing but that’s about it). While I reject his adducing of human contingency to deontology, I believe it is true we need others to help us not only be ethical beings, but to reach our fullest potential as human beings.

And so once more: it is to art I turn (as expression of our fellow individuals) as a way that facilitates or allows us to realise our fullest potential as human beings.

In 2020, I found myself in Auckland briefly. While waiting for a friend to pick me up for brunch, I visited a small independent book store that mostly sold zines and other small indie publishings of New Zealand scholars, poets, writers and multi-media artists. They also stocked a selection of photography books, and my well-trained eye ( this makes me reminisce of my “training expeditions” in 2014 as a very, very young lady at a £1 bookstore on the edge of Greenwich village, where my eyes fairly boggled and could not stop at anything as simply everything was a run of complete disorganisation in triangular formations –as in, books were piled up as high as they would precariously go, and when I asked about a book –Mervyn Peake? — and was met with an incredulous stare (i suppose, its my fault as the bookshop was testimony enough. Honestly, Black Books would be a paragon of the Dewey Decimal system in comparison to this bookstore)), snagged on a big book.

I took the book into my hands and examined it carefully: a selection of photographic works from the 1950s onwards by such greats like Diane Arbus, Daido Moriyama, Jim Goldberg, Bruce Davidson to those whom I have not heard of at all. As the subtitle describes; it is a collection of photographic works of people/individuals and communities outisde of mainstream society –”on the margins” –and are usually hidden or tucked safely away from genteel eyes and sensible acceptance. Runaway kids. Misfit communities. Cross-dressing eunuchs singing karaoke. A commune of sex working cross-dressers. Character-filled Carnival-like Soviet villages. Populist criminals with muzzled pet hyenas. Unassuming desert towns that are in fact a living mass burial site of disappeared young women.

From America, Japan, Chile, Russia, Nigeria and so on, we become spectators of these lives that exist discretely apart and unknown to us, either due to space/time, or merely as is the way of existence where things are endlessly possible and existing despite its impossibility. The chances of existence come to be as they may, and sometimes as we may make it; but as an individual we can only lead one journey the length of an eyelash in time, and many lives will never, ever intersect with ours. And that is one of the greatest shame in life I know; that we may not know all as we may know one. To have a clearer view of how eccentric life is; how truth is a thousand times stranger than fiction. To know this as reality.

At times unsettling, but always necessary. And as such, experiencing this collection of photography in 2020 affected me greatly, and even now, as I write this, passing over its pages once more. If you’re into photography, this is a book not to be missed…

With love,

Amaya