Encounters

Abstract

Is the person next to you really seeing what you yourself are seeing? The key idea of my MFA thesis exhibition emerged from this seemingly simple yet difficult question. Being a foreigner in the United States for more than a decade, I wondered how people perceive time and social spaces. I often feel some sense of distance between others and myself both physically and culturally. I am very curious what creates one's perception. Perceptions are linked to one's memory (the time dimension) and cognition. Put differently, our relationships to objects are shaped by our cultural "habitus,"1 which is often a taken-for-granted, habitual way of experiencing, in addition to more physiological and biological cognition of forms, colors, and spatial positioning. I created a large sculptural installation work, entitled "Encounters", to understand more about this structure of perceptions.