I've had this line of thought for a while now, the lingering feeling at the back of my mind that I have such a wealth of materials right in my family history that is so closeby yet I do not know much of it at all. it feels like there is a treasure chest, open and waiting for me to dig through, but it feels wrong to do so, like I am not ready, and definitely not qualified to collect and present them in a different way. it's even hard to explain. I can only describe it in conversational tones because that is all I know. the books they published state the chronicle of events much better. there's even a timeline. so, my grandpa's this, I guess you could say a leader of a 'religious' (you could say buddhist) group in taiwan. from the outside, it may even look like a cult, it's so huge. but, growing up strangely within yet simultaneously out of it (complicated family history here of us, not including him, relocating countries from some dangers he encountered at some point, I know this sounds vague but I am also half in the dark about this also) leaves me in a really uncertain place when confronted with it. even like a simple visit to see my grandpa, like yesterday. I have a great depth of respect and admiration of his achievements, (conveniently chronicled in a new thirty-five-year anniversary special edition book that goes through essentially the main arcs of his life and challenges in detail) that mostly happened before I was born. I feel guilty for not following the practice closely, especially now. it feels wrong. how can so many disciples bow before him, and I, someone so closely related to someone so great, not practice even the basics of his teachings? and I have a great will to learn. yesterday, in his office where my mum, sister, and I chatted with him after arranging a time with him and one of his secretaries, I think, was really good and I'm always happy to see him, but it is always in awe and I never know how to act. I wish I had more to offer or be a normal grandchild. I don't know how to be good to family, in general. it makes me sad. anyway, why am I bringing this up now?
as you know I have been thinking around the idea of 'documentation' (and still, I am not clear on my personal definition of this - I realised that not everyone will view this word the same. I suppose I think immediately to the 'mundane', 'interactions with people, including family, especially in dialogue', 'observations of (possibly artificial and certainly man-made) nature, in the city', all recorded in an amateur, tourist, blurry, low quality, at times not pointed to the direction of the subject, 'dead space', frequent zooming, uncomfortably long or short duration of video, or the abundance of photographs/the lack of)..............and recieving a few books they published about him/his teachings, including some translated into english (e.g. introductory book to chan practice), and the speech he made in america, and this really fascinating one which is a collection of photographs that have captured real spiritual light in various events. all these documentations have been hand picked by my grandpa at the final stage after being closely examined by experts of photographic and scientific fields to check that they have not been manipulated. of course, from the outside these may just seem like hogwash, smoke and mirrors, but I know it is real, I have felt it before, in one of the memories in one of the sessions I attended as a child. and you do not need evidence to know it is true, if you know it, you know it is true. in the introduction it says those who do not believe it will always doubt, but worded much better in mandarin. I am thankful for the translations. that is the other thing. it feels real and true and what I grew up with in mandarin, these terms I hear often, but when translated into english it has a particular sound to it e.g light of True Nature, light of wisdom, etc. that you associate with, well, spiritual language you usually just brush off. it's strange to feel I sit between these two languages, one I know well and communicate with in english, and the other I understand and can speak it, but cannot manipulate it at will and in turn, understand it truly. but I know the practice transcends language. wow, I sound like I'm in a cult. but no, I can assure you this is real and I am sane and grateful to be so close to such a wonderful practice and being. our mind/spirit is a powerful thing. if you focus your energy to certain parts of the body, you can feel that part glow warm and move. you can try it with the palm of your hand. that's the fundamentals of chan practice, explained poorly with no knowledge at all. I'm working on it.... the other side of this dilemma is that I hear all sorts of things from the inside mostly from my mum, darker things about the organisation. not everyone is good here. we are on earth, after all. there was a really hard time when my grandpa was basically kidnapped and we had to flee the country. it was always things like this, why I moved around so much as a kid. everything is in fragments and I am left in the dark. and then the time where a disciple basically betrayed my grandpa after he saved him from literal hell, my mum told me my grandpa travelled to hell to drag him back and his earthly body was affected, his foot never was the same again, black as soot. at least, that was the image I had in my head. this said disciple went ahead and built his own huge organisation using the same principles of teachings. we don't talk about him. I don't even know if it is ok or safe for me to babble on so much on here about things I don't know. everything I said is real to me and my family.
anyway, the dilemma I have now is what I should do with -this- moving forward. I'm at a weird crossroads where I do not want to make work that digs up personal family events in too much detail (my mum said he is well-known in taiwan, but a lot of the media and people online say hateful things and accusations. it's a messy world to be involved with politics too), and it is like I am almost seeing him from the outside (like I suddenly opened my eyes to what he has actually done in his life for so many people) yet I am placed so close to this character. I also do not want to make a mockery out of any of these materials. for e xample, I could recreate photographs from the 'spiritual light of the universe' book, and easily recreate similar 'light' effects on photoshop or even phone apps. but that feels extremely disrespectful. I think the process of collecting these photographs of these events from people who were there to witness it, and eliminating them by experts, then hand-picked by my grandpa is an interesting flow of events. like curation, for a book. I liked the way the photographs were placed and laid out and categorised, there were ones capturing light from his body, with animals, in grand events, and casual photographs with fellow disciples and even my grandma, who I do not know very well and had passed away when I was a toddler. would it be disrespectful to manipulate the images after scanning them, the same way I was manipulating the low quality images in greyscale? the process of making them hard to 'read' seems symbolic of my approach to this whole thing, being half in the dark. but would it also come off as something that shouldn't be done? these images feel like they should be celebrated in their original form, divine evidence of spiritual energy. in a way, it is a testament to how little we, as humans, can actually see fro our naked eyes. there is a really great introduction in the book that talks about this. it's like, we have this evidence that this light we cannot see is real, but even with this evidence we have the tendency to doubt it. even I, as ashamed as I am to admit it, have the tiniest shred of doubt. but I do one hundred percent believe in his powers and practice.
I would love to paint from manipulated or collaged imagery, possibly from something extracted from these strangely distanced forms of documentation. in a way, these documentations feel similar to the casio qv-10a in the way I feel distanced from it. because of time. it's always time. I guess both things happened in the past and I am rediscovering it now, trying to access it again(!). the camera, that does not work anymore, I find amateur videos on youtube reviewing the device, I can document the old object now and it is not the same. my grandpa and his achievements while considering my immediate distanced experience of it all, me trying to access it right now, whilst my grandpa himself is still here, yet i cannot 'access' him due to language and emotional barriers. I can only make do with what I have. and that is, these publications, the archive of photographs printed in these books, the information and text in them, and also my grandpa's personal collection of treasures (he is a collector of sorts, of precious stones and weaponry and statues and such), within which I am most interested in, the apparent taxidermy (possibly disassembled from its bones, and possibly fake as well) of the extinct mammoth. (the other taxidermy specimen in the collection includes this huge alligator but its stored far away and I don't think I can access it, the only reason I remember it is because of the traumatic memory of being told to sit on it, it was terrifying, I remember it being in the center of an empty room with wooden floors. maybe that's one of the reasons why I have this attraction-repulsion to taxidermy, which is also a form of documentation, but of real skin, and is a staged one at that, that's why it is so endlessly fascinatingly wrong and important and right). anyway, I'll see it next wednesday but I'll have limited time and equipment, and I'm not sure how to approach it yet. I think by approaching it as an almost tourist to my own grandpa's collection, taking 'tourist' pictures with it, or of it, of video and photo, would be useful anyhow. also, I am thinking particularly about the series of images used in la jetée where they are in the natural history museum, and they are both looking at the collection. I need to revisit those scenes and possibly recreate the sentiment of it. (perhaps I could manipulate them in the same greyscale way).
I almost forgot I was only just looking at herzog's film family romance llc yesterday. my grandpa arranged on the same day to meet us, and I woke up after a fatigued nap hearing the conversation of this arrangement in the same afternoon thinking, how ironic that I was looking at this real company in japan who rented out pretend-families. i felt like I was a pretend-grandchild. what could I do with this? it was so interesting that they used amateur actors and the actual ceo of the company to play his part in the film captured 'amateurly' by herzog himself. that extremely strange and uncanny feeling of watching actors act in real situations. and the fact that herzog embedded other illusions in modern life as well, like the companion robots/robot hotel, the robotic fish, the picture booths, the lies you tell people to cover up embarassing truths. he addresses the fundamental question and blurry line of 'illusions' 'pretending' 'acting' in our everyday life and if it is necessary to get by with it, or if its because these illusions exist that we become even more lonely. it is a fascinating in-between space. the 'almost-real', including humans(e.g. robots and people lying or slightly exaggerating to cover up something else) , and nature (e.g. robotic fish and taxidermy and nature in the city and zoos and amusement park rides). so many ambiguous spaces that I feel I dipped a toe in these days. I don't know where to start.