Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu 劉 行欣

I Carry the Universe With Me 我將宇宙隨身攜帶
2024 / 21:20 / B/W & Color / Sound / 1.33:1 / Original format: 16mm 

In a future dominated by technological images, how will human culture be rewritten? Will history be reset? Is the land beneath my feet still habitable? Is the sky the same sky? I was curious about how artificial intelligence described the images I took of the world. Here a cow is seen as a horse, and a boat is seen as a vase. Realities and hyperrealities are woven together as if this is the prototype of the myth of modern life. I want to depart from programmed worlds and return to nature, although what I can capture is the momentary refraction of light. This refraction makes me believe that nature still exists. Do I live in nature or does nature dream of me?

Artist Statement:

Part of this work uses an old film shot a hundred years ago in Newhall, California, to intertextualize with images taken in the same area today. People once immigrated to Newhall for gold mining, and today the William S. Hart Museum of the Cowboy West is there. History does move along a timeline, but the footprints under our feet have faded. Virtual space replaces traditional expeditions. In the computer-derived world, one hundred years is just a number.

The poet Alberto Caeiro would say that instead of philosophizing too much, let's look at the world objectively. When I open the window, the stones are here in the sun and the river flows there. This is nature. However, in a flat world, where is nature? There are many shades of blue in the sky, and the color space changes depending on the interface used. 

More than two thousand years ago, the Zhuangzi once said that heaven and earth are “one finger”, and all things are “one horse”. Heaven, earth, and horses are people’s views and names for things, not the things themselves. In the film, I used artificial intelligence to generate descriptions based on image analysis programs. They are false references, not the images themselves. Zhuang Zhou dreamed of a butterfly, whether it was Zhuang Zhou who dreamed that he had become a butterfly, or whether a butterfly had dreamed that it had become Zhuang Zhou. Today, two thousand years later, we may have to ask whether the real me lives in the virtual world, or the virtual me lives in the real world.

I wanted to take the entire universe with me, and I could.

Old and enormous are the stars.
Old and small is the heart, and it
Holds more than all the stars, being,
Without space, greater than the vast expanse.
(From Pessoa’s Ruba’iyat, In the Manner of Omar Khayyam)