Handsome River

When I was in high school, I enjoyed geography class. There were many hydrographic maps in the textbook. Looking at those curved lines, I felt they were just like the palm lines of my hand. A river flows in my hand, I guessed. I was always thinking, in these maps, a watershed loses all its characteristics except for its hydrological data.

Meanwhile, as Agamben said, the state of exception normalized by Leviathan has compressed our lives into a purely biological state, totally losing all the dimensions of public life, which can be fate, marriage or career, the things that we value in traditional palmistry. The future becomes vague and unpredictable. In this post-pandemic society, some population hogs safety and security, and others struggle to survive, just to breathe. The world is divided by the qualified and the unqualified, the authentic and the inauthentic, a distinction that has replaced the traditional boundaries of identity politics.

It is not that we have voluntarily stepped out of the Anthropocene, but that today's immunology devices, which serve a few qualified lives, has left the majority of us less than human beings, and expelled from the warm and cozy Anthropocene. We became biological and nomadic, like rivers running naked on the Earth as we saw from those pictures taken by satellites.

By combining traditional palmistry and watershed mapping, with the technique of pattern recognition and ArcGIS simulation, my installation aims to visually reveal the "Bare Life" that we are gradually becoming in the post-pandemic era where the state of exception is normalized. Unlike traditional palmistry, image divination in this context is based on the observation and description of artificially generated natural forms. What I want to reflect on through the transformation of body-artificial-nature is, the purely biological state, which completely loses all dimensions of public life. We need a new intuition to see through the desolation of our time.