Jieying Shao | Spoon
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Empty Chairs
Ongoing Project
I was obsessed with the empty chairs that I came upon on the streets. Sometimes I was wandering around the city for a whole day, just to find those chairs. Each of them has the profile of a man who has a checkered past. Who are they in my imagination? Who is the last one have seated on them? Who left them here? I was reading them as much as I was reading the strangers. Empty, abandoned, left, but never disappear, that is a life of man whose stories deserved to be heard.
In front of a church, it writes: God loves people. However, the character means “love” fell down. They kept it unceremoniously in a corner of the back yard. The church located in a mountain village out of nowhere.
In front of a street restaurant, petals of faded crimson roses were collected and aired on a chair. “But for their virtue only is their show They live unwood, and unrespected fade Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made”
Chairs in pair, human in love, you see them meet, date, fall in love, suffocated in a bad relationship.
“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”