We see images of a city. We see streets with traffic, parks and planes flying overhead. They are colourful street scenes with drawings added made by a black felt-tip on transparent sheets. The street scenes are of an unspecified city; it could be any city. But the drawings, partly because of the handwriting, seem to refer to personal images – the city 'coloured' with the associations of someone. The associations brought to the screen here link the personal to the general, but there are also associations to more general events and which far transcend one's own life: the personal as a part of the general. In phenomenology our own limited and naive observations of the world are regarded as the starting point of all knowledge. But with concepts like 'the city' you certainly do not talk about a personal perspective. You talk then about a general concept, about something that is seen more or less from all sides, about the whole; then it is no longer about specific streets and squares. This presumes that the city – as regards place as well as time – is detached from your own direct observations. By making the personal visible and linking it to the general images, we get a picture of someone's observations and can distinguish things that are observed and experienced by many people at the same time from all sorts of sides and points of time from the individual. We regard as 'reality' that what we see communally and what we talk about together. But as we have only one pair of ears and one pair of eyes and we are dependent on others: to gain knowledge we must trust each others' judgement. Especially when man imposes his will on nature and when the taoist ideal (the individual as part of nature) seems to be disappearing.
– Carla Hoekendijk
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Shaoxiong Chen ° 1962, Shantou (China)
Lives and works in Guangzhou (China)
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