Family Language is an attempt to research trauma through linguistic study. By recollecting and analyzing languages that were floating around in the familial space, my purpose is to understand how trauma was encrypted in our language and how it shapes our unconscious.
Blessings
2020
Blessings is an experimental film that derives from the CCTV footage, sound track of blessing and car video of roads that I arrive and depart by many times. I reassemble the longest activity my grandmother does everyday—lying on the couch to give a glimpse of her life, diptych with my journey of coming to and leaving from place recorded by car dash-cam.
Accusations
2019
Accusations is an experimental film that arises from collections of my mother’s degrading linguistic acts towards me. They are categorized by the language’s effect on female’s identity in my family. To represent the effects of these constant linguistic acts on my unconscious, her shadow in my inner world, I project her face onto my face surrounded by her words. The process of my face disappearing and her face becoming more visible, metaphorically visualizes how trauma is transmitted by language, in disguise of family education.
Little Lambs
2019
Little Lambs, derived from two emails--a written conversation between me and my sister, the first attempt we tried to discuss the trauma that we inherit from the family, an argument on what is love, what is violence. I re-situated the emails into an imaginary conversation, depleted of emotions that are visible in one voice, and reinvented hidden feelings into unconscious optic that was constructed by movement of different light sources—fireworks, rain drops, lamps, Christmas lights. The aim is to portray a contradiction between violence and love, and that words and emotions sometimes echo falsely.
Wish
&
Whisper
2020
Wish and Whisper comprises of two linguistic acts: wish for girls in the form of praise— a guiding structure for women; whisper from mothers for daughters at the night before marriage— a tradition to deliver the women virtue. Disregard all good intentions, these linguistic acts speak of self-murdering process, to modify women into the “perfect state” for the family— to desire nothing, swallow other people’s misery and to eat their own bitterness.