Shared Subjectivities
2024 Photo Sculpture
Pan Shanghai - Artist Residency at the Goethe Institut Shanghai
Contributors: Yang Xiyue, Melissa Gallego, Liang Weijie
How can we use an expanded language system to share subjectivities with one another?
Can we ever witness what someone else sees through language?

My works often explore how we might seek out the perspectives of others from different backgrounds, whether that be other individuals from different cultures or other species from different biological kingdoms. Shared subjectivities based on trust and understanding can enrich our worldview from a multi-perspectival lens.
For Shared Subjectivites, I used photography as an experimental tool to access the subjective worlds of others. I invited members of the residency to take walks with me and prompted each participant to use language (in an expanded sense) to communicate the scene they wanted to capture.
For example, I asked 1 participant to only direct me through their gaze and not use any verbal hints to express the scene they wanted to capture, while with another participant I asked him to use descriptions of the scene during our walks to try and communicate precisely what they wanted to capture.
They would direct the photos but could not see the image.
For each instance of such communication, I would only take a single picture and the participant would not get to see the image until the walk was complete. The images in this photo sculpture are the results of those collaborative experiments in communication and sharing.
Context: Pan Shanghai Artist Residency
The project emerged within the context of an artist residency with Pan Shanghai, a theater group bringing artists together from multiple international backgrounds for a short-form theatrical residency. The residency explored how to bridge cultural differences through the beauty of languages through artistic collaboration and experimentation.
The 2024 theme of Bridging Babel looked at the idea of communicating across multiple languages. Not only languages from different cultures but the residency also considered long linguistic modes of communication. The participants communicated with a wide range of international languages including, Mandarin, French, German, Cantonese, English, Arabic, Spanish, Sign language, Braille, and more.









