I am looking into the idea on how we understand concepts of emotions such as pathos through a cross-cultural context. Using the Greek notion of pathos, I investigate other corresponding non-western aesthetic concepts, such as Chinese lyrical tradition concept of qing jing jiao rong (fusion of scene and emotion), Japanese aesthetics of mono no aware (pathos of things), etc. This research has led me to further interest in the dilemma of translation. There are concepts which exist in one culture quite vividly, but which also do not contain a single trace in other cultures of their etymology.
Given the different developments in intellectual history, culturally and philosophically it especially shapes people’s ideas on the encounter of interpretation on landscape images. The language of emotion is embedded in the reading from these images. It cannot be simply an act of deciphering or de-coding as the several layers of the translation is required. These are visually, linguistically, and culturally.
My methods are based on looking into different usage of metaphor, symbol, and parallelism in the context of literary text and then expanding this approach to visual images. Other methods I have developed in my practice include searching for images from archives, collecting antique photographs, old postcards and paper ephemeral, as well as exploring my personal family albums. Through scanning, cropping, collaging, and engaging in experimental printing or re-scanning. The result is a photograph of a photograph and an image within an image.
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