Jieying Shao |  Spoon
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What is freedom to you?
October 2021

At the first place, it is not a question about freedom itself.  You have to answer another question before you answer this one.

That is, what retrains you?

Freedom is asked because people are restrained.

 A solicitor is restrained by the law.
 A communist ‘s decision about pursuing utopia might be because the big brother is watching.

The last nine month witnesses my extreme longing for freedom but also my never ending haunting stress and pain.  My desire for freedom becomes the prison, that stopped me stepping outside of the 10- square meter-size room with curtains down during daylight and window opened during midnight for me to smoke my frustration out to the cold night air and inside my screaming lungs. I watched sun set and rise almost at the same time because I lost track of time. The boundary between day and night seems not important to me anymore because it is blurred into my tears, my headache, my sadness, my anger and my confusion. I was confused. This was the first time that I don’t know where I am heading towards while I know what I want. It is a boat in a tremendous ocean and I have the map which only writes the destination without the route towards it. Thus, I sailed towards different directions and every direction I turned to was a dead end, or even worse, a loop, a puzzle, a scary, miserable hunting game. And I am the game. I am the prey. I am the little bird chased by the eagle. I am the little fish running away from the shark. It appears to me that what I want and what I think do not matter anymore. It is not me who is in control of the flooding of the life. I lost control of my life. I do not have the freedom I want. 

So, what retrained me? 



Two years ago, I came to London, by myself, with three black suitcases. Three suitcases in different size, small, medium and large. Almost like a Russian Matryoshka doll to me. I still don’t know what it means but it seems a metaphor to me. It indicated what would happen to me. In a way, they are my base. I shall not possess more than these three suitcases could hold. I am a Norman on my three suitcases. I have to let it go while it became so heart-breaking for me to realize how much I want something. I insisted the thing I wanted is what can set me free until I realize it is what I wanted that put me into a circle I cannot leave. I throw away my blankets, I throw away my paintings, I throw away some of my friendship and I throw away some of my dreams. However, there are still things that hurt me so deeply and continue to hurt me that I would not let it go even I cried almost to faint. It made me realize, my freedom and my prison are two sides of the coin. Things I thought that would free me is exact the thing that cut my road towards freedom. What a Möbius band, what a non-orientable journey I am heading towards. 

I didn’t cry when my parents sent me to the airport and we waved goodbye to each other. I wrote in the diary: I feel I might be too cold if judged by the social stigma of Individualism because I seems to be ungrateful to not cry when I leave the people who gave birth to me and raise me up to who I am.  However, my excitement of finally stepping outside the town and being able to touch the moon that was outside of the reach for the whole time was beyond description. To be honest, I never thought I would stay. So to me at that time, it was just a long trip. And I considered this trip is my be late rebellion that didn’t visit me during my teenager life. It was not a rebellion towards my family, my parents. The support me the best way I could image a parent could do, a friend could do, a human could do. It was a rebellion to my silent give up towards my comfortable zone. It was a rebellion to my 24 years never live outside of the city where I was born and raised. It was a trip to me. I always thought I would return back to my home, my so called life, my so called life path once I finished my study in London, 9000 km away from my hometown.  



However, everything changed and at one point London becomes my destination and I become a Norman who doesn’t have a home. London isn’t my home, I know I don’t belong here. Home isn’t home anymore, I know I belonged there but not anymore. I don’t know where is home. I watched Nomadland. I recognize myself as a Nomad but I am desperate for a home. I cried and cried over and over again. Then, I remember about an article that I read in my text book when I was 12 years old about travellers on a bus. I never really understand it until 15 years later, me sitting in the balcony that I finally moved in. It is the 8th place that I’ve lived in London.  It talks about the passengers on a bus. Where are they going? No matter they are going back home or travel from home, it all based on one single fact: They are on the way. Going back home, means they left home. Traveling from home means they are leaving from home.  We as human, cannot resist the desire of leaving home. Some people might not leave home their entire life but they still feel homeless. Life is a bitter journey. And the tragedy  of  human, is not only that the destinations are always desired but not reached, but also that when they are on the way they are always missing home where they decided to leave. The tragedy also lays at that people cannot go back home. Physically being back to where you are from doesn’t necessary mean that the feeling of homeless is not haunting you anymore. Home is an abstract signification. 

My childhood memory becomes a deep loveable fairy tale to me. Everything seems to shine and I have a blur feeling that it might be the kind of life I want to have in my future. But I don’t understand why it needs to take such a long and painful dusty way to go back to where I come from. Is life just a race on painted playground? I don’t understand. But I don’t have time to stop and think about it. I have to keep going. By knowing I might be on my way going back to my past won’t help me to go to where shall be my future. Life is a complicated gamble and the only way to not lose is keep bating.  





WHO ARE YOU, MUM?
June 2020


Quarantine in a country far away from my homeland influenced the way I interact with my family. This leads me to a new practice concerned about the relationship between my mother and me. It starts from a personal diary about my life with people who have a close relationship with me during the quarantine time. People asked me questions and I replied. This new experience reminds me of the importance of intimate communication between individuals and it becomes where I started my rethink project.

I used to avoid social events due to the lack of confidence and communication skills and my excuse was that as an introvert I was born to stay alone. This misunderstanding comes from my superficial understanding of what is social. No human is an island, we are all social animals and the interactions between people are the most beautiful thing that enables human beings to rely on each other. Hence, it is the fundamental reason that human is distinguished from other spices. For me, the beauty of the process is it breaks the fixed perspective I perceived the objects and allow deeper excavations got involved.

In this process, I am not only repositioning myself in the way of approaching the outside world but also exploring my inner self during this special time period. Later when I invited my parents to join, my father refused while the talks between my mother and me led the practice gradually transformed into a discussion about family and relationships and female identity.

Relationship

The current condition related to the virus changes the way people perceive their relationships with people around them: it depends more on online communications; physical contacts are decreasing due to the lockdown policy; people tend to spend more time stay alone. These situations are tough for most of us, however, they also give us a chance to look back at ourselves and have a deeper conversation with people. The distance creates a new balance for communication.

For me, this project becomes a platform to understand the relationship between people and me better. It becomes an inspiration source that has the possibility to create different sub-project. I collaborated with my friend Carolina Semprucci, an Italian artist on a project about standard beauty. I was surprised by the influence that questioning brought to me. Rather than approaching towards the outside world as I used to do before the lockdown, another direction that I always ignored is now seen: I started to explore my inner self, leading towards a better understanding of the

CRITICAL REFLECTION ESSAY JIEYING SHAO JUNE,2020

relationship between me and people around me, as well as the values I hold about the world. The questions I received from my roommates are mainly about my experiences and emotions. It took me back to the journey I have already been through. This journey of looking back to my history becomes the reason I rethink my methods: I choose to use collage with my old photos rather than make new photographs.

I have a close relationship with my parents. Since I moved to London, we started calling each other. On top of the physical distance between us, the covi-19 situation influences the way we interact with each other. We prefer to use phone calls rather than video calls as the voice simply enables our emotional connections to become deeper. It provides both of us with more space to know each other better since we start to feel free to talk about the topics we tended to avoid in conversations face to face. I started reading books to my mum before she went to bed. Sometimes she will fall asleep with my voice. The invitation I sent to my parents to join this project got a different response from my father and my mother, which allows me to reassess the different roles of them and their different way of dealing with relationships.

My father refused to ask me questions without any hesitation. This is not disappointing because later it brought a conversation about how he thinks about the relationship between a father and a daughter. It made both of us felt closer. He admitted that he was overwhelmed by my request and he is afraid of the fact that knowing more about me will make him realize I am a grown-up individual and no longer his young little daughter. He feels sad because this reminds him that I eventually will leave him. However, the conversation also invites him to think more about the physical distance and emotional distance.

On the other hand, my mother was more open to this. Later I realize that has something to do with the similarity between us. When she was at the same age as me, she was also living with her friends far away from her family to pursue her dream. Until we started to talk about it, I didn’t realize how similar we were. My intention was to let my mum know more about me while it actually helped me to establish a new understanding of her. I was surprised by the questions. I realized I underestimated my mum by assuming her asking me questions like “What do you eat today?” “Who are you with right now?” “What you plan to do in the future?” while she was curious about my reading experience, my understanding of techniques, knowledge, and emotions. At first, the questions are still about me. However, as our conversations become deeper, my mum’s questions started to be about something more than me. She started to question herself and the relationship between the two of us. She seems like asking herself questions through me. It eventually leads to my thought about the relationship between mother and daughter. Who is her before she became my mother and other than this family role what kind of life she lived, is living, and to be living. What is more, to understand what is motherhood means to a woman in her life. Or is it an essential experience? To what extent it will change a woman? Answering the questions from my mum let me realize that as an individual,

she has different roles. I remember once she told me she feels stuck in her life as a wife and a mother. Hence, with this project, I want to talk about the importance of being a daughter to encourage her mother to achieve herself and to enjoy her life.

Multimedia practice

Who are you, mum? is a visual project using different multimedia that I have seldom exposed to. It involves photographs, collage arts, paintings, hand-writings, and audios. Eventually, the final presentation is a stop motion video. To understand the form of the art is initially working for the contents, I try to avoid overuse different methods and only keep them when they are needed. Video becomes an appropriate way to combine everything in a smooth way and a suitable presentation for this piece.

Conclusion

In a further act of collaboration with my mother, the project might be involving interviews and interactive art or performance art in the future. It would be nice if there is a way to let my mother take more parts of the creative process.

In the meanwhile, I would like to approach this project by involving more subjects including my dad and my friends in a different presentation. It will become a very personal and intimate project for me. However, I am confused by myself motivated by personal works rather than journalism works which could help the world especially in such a pandemic historical time period. My next step will also be considering how to find the universality within this project.

Besides, I feel there is more room left to be discovered by improving the use of multimedia and update the quality of them.

Appendix

Questions from my mum and My text answers
  1. How did reading influence your values?
    Reading allows me to see myself through someone’s mirror. It rotates my world, it enables me to realize that value has no absolute standard.
  2. Your thoughts about The Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.
    Classic becomes classic is because they reflect the lives of most people and then they influence more people by these reflections.
  3. Talk about time management
    It is a matter of being a good theft
  4. How do you understand the relationship between techniques, knowledge and emotions?
    Use techniques to get knowledge. With knowledge, we can express our emotions better.
  5. What is my favorite thing according to your understanding of me?
    Talking with people
  6. What is woman
    Women are beautiful puzzles, for other people and themselves to solve.
  7. What do you think my ideal man will be?
    Someone you look through, not to find romance but yourself.
  8. Why I didn’t have proper wedding photos taken until you were thirteen and it was a group wedding shooting with five of your dad’s friends and their wives, how do you feel about this?
    Tell me: How do you understand marriage?



Spoon's Answers to Carolina Semprucci's Questions  
April 2020



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