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This is the longest clip from The Most International Artist in the Universe, Tintin Wulia 2011, a site-specific multiple-channel installation of advertisement clips in duration of 15″, 30″, 45″ and 60″ installed in between other artworks and hidden in toilets. |
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It is no other than movement in space, over time, that allows a change in perspective.
From one point in space, at one point of time, you can see a smoothly curved line. You have the option to believe that that’s the only reality: that the line you’re looking at is smoothly curved. |
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You can then decide whether to stop there and nest forever there – in the understanding that the line you’re looking at is smoothly curved. But you can also decide to move a little bit to your left. And when you’ve done this, you’ll see how your whole perspective would change: from your new point in space, at that point in time, the line might not be smoothly curved anymore. It might be a little bit crooked. |
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Who knows what it might transform into when you move even more to your left. You might dislike this change of perspective, though, and fear not: you always have the option to stay sedentary. Fate is almost entirely your decision after all. But even our bulky continents are moving as we speak, and as Bucky Fuller once said, the earth is a giant spaceship. We are perpetually moving, in space, over time. Everything in us is perpetually moving, in minuscule space, over minuscule time. But then again, we can still always opt not to see. We can still always opt not to imagine. Try this: at this point of slow time, it can appear that although we agree that we are constantly moving, we have only been moving along the same route over and over for thousands of years. Without the appropriate imagination, the change of perspectives we experience could become another constant cliché. A change of perspectives on time, however, is possible, and necessary. Take one small step back at a time. Maybe that’s why I love timelapse. |
| Images are installation details of Lure (Tintin Wulia 2009) at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. Images courtesy of Naoko Sumi. |
“If you can write down your passport number without having to look at your passport,” the border police said smugly, “your passport is definitely fake.”
What a training, I thought. Quietly, I felt sorry for him.
The three other police were fully armed. They were at least twice my size. When they walked me – one in front, one behind, and one at my side – I couldn’t help giggling.
“It gets really boring around here,” they said. But I kept waiting for a punch line.
About forty hours later, I finally gave up.
Reality needs to be watched in order to keep itself existing. Atlas used to take on that responsibility, but his time is over because in our time people believe more in science than in Greek mythology.
This is why our modern earth is divided into time zones. Time zones are designed so that different people would wake and sleep at different times. And this is why time zones do not work in blocks – they work in gradation, to ensure that there will always be someone waking when all the others are sleeping.
Once every million years, however, everyone that is waking would blink at exactly the same time, for exactly the same duration, and put reality in jeopardy. It is suspected that the dinosaurs and all the compatriots in their reality once did exactly that. Lucky for us in our time of history, plants do not blink, and as much as we often look down on them, they do constitute part of our reality.
If I would have been born exactly where I was born — approximately 4400 kilometres away from where I currently reside — but 100 years before, people might have called me a Chinese Dutch East Indian. If I would have been born exactly where I was born but 30 years before, my birth certificate would have been — like my mother’s birth certificate was — written in the Japanese year 2602.
Luckily I was born exactly where I was born in 1972 Anno Domini, in a world where printing machines have been discovered centuries ago and the Internet is therefore eventual. This has consequently enabled me to start a collection of passports from all the existing nation-states in this world.
At this stage, I have 129 passports. Doesn’t that make me the most international artist in the universe?
When she was thirteen, Tintin Wulia wished that Peter Pan would lose his shadow in her neighborhood, because she thought that Peter Pan was kinda sexy. Night after night, she would think a happy thought, wishing that Peter would find her if she could fly. Nothing happened – Tintin discovered that Peter had much preferred Wendy.
Two decades and almost seven years later, Tintin is still discovering many things. One, that Peter Pan is a fictional character invented by James Matthew Barrie. Two, that the fact that Peter is fictional doesn’t mean that he’s illusory. She is also discovering that, three, it is not a happy thought that one needs to be able to fly – it is, rather, the combination of a passport and a valid visa. And also, four, that the fact that one needs a passport and a valid visa to be able to fly is just shitty.
