marie.

I must say that it seems to be working. I wore my Binna Choi t-shirt when I went on a train to Bairnsdale last Friday. I went in the gate, showing my ticket to the gate attendant, then realised I wanted to get snack. So I went out again.

At the entrance of the snack shop, I could see a surveillance video of myself on a TV monitor just above the door. Again, it was a mirror image. Binna Choi, says my t-shirt.

A few minutes before my train departs, I hurried in, showing my ticket again to the same gate attendant. He, however, didn’t look at my ticket at all. Instead, he pointed at my shirt and said “[unintelligible] Binna Choi?”

It’s unfortunate that I had to hurry to my train, so I just said to him, “Ah! You know me already!” and ran in.

In the train I imagined how a conversation would have gone on with him.

My own Che is a work examining the relationship between identity, individuality, belongingness and ownership. Che refers to the popular icon of t-shirts and self-determination Che Guevara. As part of this work I manually print people’s names on second-hand white t-shirts to be sold as commercial commodity. People can choose to buy the available single edition t-shirts with a name on it – they could buy one with their own name, their friend’s, or even with a name unfamiliar to them. The names are printed in mirror image, so that the wearer can read the name imprinted on their t-shirts while looking at their own images on the mirror.