The South Is Infinite Yet Finite

Named after a line from Huishi’s The Ten Paradoxes, excerpt from the chapter The World in Zhuangzi. When principles are framed and generalized as knowledge, how do we view everything when the unknown remains infinite? In this project, I try to visualize my perplexity and thoughts regarding understanding binary and hierarchical systems of knowledge production. I create documentary images in knowledge-producing institutions such as museums, laboratories, and libraries. I make posed, restructured, juxtaposed photographic experiments in lightning studios, domestic setups, or unspecified locations. These combinations are meant to complicate notions of validity, and truth, with experiential and intuitive ways of knowing. The intersections complicate the institutional and infuse the mundane into a unified visual language that challenges the absolutes of answers and definitions. My hope is that from these images will arise more questions: both mine and the readers’ past, present, and future, full of unfolding stories and non-linear narratives in conversation across time.