Ziyun Zou

Life is fragile. 

During the lockdown, a complete transformation of life was experienced as if everyone had to press the pause button on the routine of their lives. There was a demand which was issued out of this fabric of life, and with this, a series of questions arose between the space of endurance and fragility.

Fragility was a sense that I had been co-existing with since my earliest childhood. I was born in a small room and lived there until I was two and a half years old. That room was the extent of my universe. I was a locked away, enduring secret isolation, a social blind spot, unrecorded in a state of not knowing. That room is like a scar that lies deep within my flesh, which will never be erased. Memories can be like scar tissue drawing lines within your process of becoming. Imagine the shock of seeing the literal scars on my mother’s body. Such scars are written on the outside, whereas mine are written on my invisible inside.

So, I am back within a confined space. It is as if my first room is folded into this room. Maybe it is like an echo chamber. In this circumscribed space, I see some other silhouettes. A whole constellation of figures circulates within this space: trauma, isolation, memory, affect, ghosts, uncanny, mourning, oblivion. The images start to circulate as well, but it is as if there are gaps between images and words. I am in search of a space that might occasion a meeting point of images, words, and gaps. This otherness of space is what I call art because it is the place of aesthetic fascination.

In this third space, I finally experience an acceptance of my life. It should be understood as just another texture or even a text already written. I say to myself that this space is the fold of my exteriority, a meeting point of the fragility of life within its endurance of the conditions which sustain it.

Life is fragile, but it endures within a curvature of becoming other.

A person was like a bubble broken from alive to death, disappearing in an instant. Suddenly, it disappeared airily but hit the head like a heavy blow. In this way, my dear uncle passed away five years ago.

It took five days from the day the uncle was sent to the hospital to his death. "Died from a cerebral infarction", the doctor informed us. That day, there seems to be a piece of white in front of my eyes. I saw the heart-sinking slowly into the swamp. I saw floating bubbles, crystal clear in the sun, so beautiful, and then broken slowly one by one, helpless, as if it had never appeared before, and the straw and stream in this town returned to silence. I heard the sound of the clock turning, "tick, tick..." However, the voice gradually became smaller, deliberately covered by noisy crying, and then stopped; my uncle's time forever stopped in the white world.

At the funeral, my uncle lay on the place around fresh flowers; he looks fragile like a piece of fabric. Grandma's sister cried heartbrokenly while holding his corpse and kept calling his name. The impact of that scene made the family decide not to let grandma know this cruel fact, worrying that her health would not withstand such a painful blow.

So the only person absent at the funeral was my uncle's mother. We lied to her that uncle went to a remote place for work. This is indeed a ridiculous and absurd lie. We were the ones who pushed her into this lie, which was like transparent amber; you can see the dead insect inside, like a tulle nearly punctured by a sharp knife. The family hoped that she would forget this son, but how could a mother forget her child? When family members visit her, she always asks: "When will he come back?". Five years passed in a flash. She became more and more silent from the initial angry reviling at my uncle. She seemed to have been waiting. I went to my uncle's house and found all his leftovers, watches, a few pieces of clothes, his ashtray, a pair of shoes he treasured very much, and a car. I put them and grandma into a frame; this is an alternative meeting. I do not know if it will reduce her regret. At least, she touched the clothes he often wears, although there was no body temperature on it; she got into the car, maybe there was a little bit of uncle's residual smell, although it was mixed with mouldy smell; held the ashtray and saw the wreathing smoke is like my uncle still sitting on the sofa watching TV and smoking, she walking over to rebuke: "Smokeless!" Each scene is a "miserable" meeting. I do not know if she knows the truth or not; she asked to keep my uncle's clothes at her apartment. "I will wait for him to get these clothes by himself" is the last word she said that day. Or maybe this connection between mother and child conveyed this death message, and she refused to accept it.

"It has been too long, my son. Waiting forever, you still alive in my mind, so this story is not a tragedy, is it?"