PERFECT STRANGER
ARCHIVAL GICLEE, ACID FREE, 320GSM
870 X 1170 MM
2018
ART BOX SET
OFFSET PRINT, ACID FREE, 61 ARTWORKS
405 × 300 × 35 MM
Perfect Stranger is a distilled collection of 61 texts, part of a year-long narrative portrait, which began on 1.6.16. While words lie here on colour-drenched pieces of paper, the entire set is meant to be laid across a flat surface,to form a soft, undulating sea of hues, flooding a single plane. Ebbing with text and gradient tones, each sheet emits a phosphorescence arising from a synthesis of shades that is unique to, and reflective of, its story.
This verbose, polychromatic series draws from a quotidian Q&A project between myself and a stranger — an Israeli child psychologist whom I barely knew, over a year. It is a fossilized, fleeting exchange shared by two women, from different pasts, presents and futures. Everyday, she would ask me a question, and I would respond. Even now, I recall writing from my hospital bed after giving birth to my first child — one of many pivotal events, which took place during the course of our daily ritual.
Over time, this process of inquisition and disclosure unveiled an intimate tapestry of fact and fiction, spanning across a barrage of recollections, observations, questions, lists, stories, poems, confessions and jokes. Perfect Stranger is an experiment in freezing time, or more accurately, moments of oneself, over time. It often strikes me that when someone says he misses something, he ordinarily alludes to a person, time or place; when what he truly misses is a version of himself, which he can never get back to again.
This project is thus a re-imagination of a self-portrait, and a narrative time capsule of one’s self right here, right now. After all, what is each of us, but a vessel of vanishing selves? And the things we feel in a passing moment, the only remnants of the day? At once, a static yet glimmering vista of shades, the work is visually emblematic of the irony and balance in binaries and dualities between stillness and change, the monumental and mundane, materiality and ephemerality, was and is, hello and goodbye.
It is core to my ongoing study of colour, emotion, nostalgia and time.
Interview Links:
https://www.artsy.net/chan-plus-hori-contemporary/article/chan-hori-contemporary-perfect-stranger-regard-by-khairuddin-hori