Book (Dictionary of Psychoanalysis) / 一本精神分析辞典
Maurice Merleau-Ponty once said, “the body is our general means of having a world,” and it is the most legitimate way of gaining knowledge and experience. Book (Dictionary of Psychoanalysis) reflects our experience of being East Asian in the international and western society. Being “the Other” in the samples of Freud’s experiments, we use white tags to label everything that is sexist, homophobic and racist in Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, to make color-scanned pictures and transferred them onto our skin to integrate the books with our bodies. Then, we use a hand scanner to touch and caress our bodies. Symbolically, the bodies cancel the meaning and authority of the text, but at the same time bear the content of the dictionary and its theoretical context. The movement of hand scanner resembles a voyeuristic view on our bodies, as well as executes a cavalier perspective image-making process (rather than the visual perspective from a camera that imitates human eyes) and is based on a sense of distance. These distorted images once again are manipulated digitally to try to stretch back in order to recover the text, and the shape of our skin became irregular after the process.
The real body is always an unknown one, waiting to be contacted by others to be answered and completed. It’s neither the body as the sample of psychoanalysis, nor the body as the absolute physical/material object. The former causes a Freudian illusion upon the body, by using white, straight, cis-male as default samples for a psychological construction, to inevitably produce the discrimination and bias towards women, non-white, and queer groups. The latter makes the body a mechanical and dull piece of meat, and aggravates the binary oppositions of “subject/object” and “mind/body.” Thus, in a world that is full of possibilities and uncertainties, our life experience becomes the most precious inspirations. The work tends to use our bodies to rethink and rectify the dogmatism in Freudian theory, and to challenge the “human/world” binary in traditional photography.
《一本精神分析辞典》从弗洛伊德式心理构型的偏颇出发，以身体在观看与被观看中的主客体矛盾身份为线索，从而用我们自己的身体与“生命经验”对《精神分析辞典》所代表的教条主义进行反思和纠偏，同时也是对传统摄影所涉及的“人-世界”主客体二元对立的观看方式进行尝试性的突破。在我们的亚裔身体作为弗氏理论缺失之样本的基础上，我们把《精神分析辞典》里所有性别歧视的、恐同的（及歧视同性恋的）、男权至上的词汇用白色标签标出，再将这本辞典转换到自己身体皮肤上，让辞典成为了身体的一部分。这时，我们的身体破坏了这本辞典和它的权威性，同时也成为了理论的承受者——并且象征地承载了辞典和它代表的理论语境，这与弗氏理论系统中的研究客体产生了对应和对立。接下来，我们再以一种散点透视的扫描方法对身体之上被身体所破坏的书本影像进行仔细的“抚摸”与“感触”，从而制造出了这些与寻常观看身体的视角全然不同的、打破传统摄影边框的、扭曲的但同时又是窥探式的影像。
C-Print, Acrylic Mounting Sandwich / C形式冲印，亚克力三明治
