Being Familiar

video installation, notebook, 2002

This work was comprised of a notebook and a video projection on the wall. The notebook was filled with my hand written words, such as “familiar,” “clear,” “obvious,” “fluent,” and “simple,” backward, from right to left. The video showed the action of writing them. It started very slowly and gradually got faster as if I became more and more adept at writing backward. I picked simple and positive words to be opposed to the main theme of unfamiliarity.

The process was inspired by the memory of my high school. In order to make students memorize new words, my English teacher used to give us assignments such as “filling ten pages with English words.” I really hated that tedious work. The main idea was to make new words familiar by writing them repeatedly. Despite all my efforts, the more I wrote the less familiar I became. The form of the word became detached from its meaning. The word became something new in repetition. Somehow the effort made words unfamiliar rather than familiar.

Since I arrived in the US , I have needed to re-define everything. Even simple words have hidden meanings. The most simple thing could be the most confusing. Writing backwards is a process I have used in this work to “examine their familiarity.”

The video showed my crude effort of “making the unfamiliar familiar in an unfamiliar way.” It was a sarcastic action because it was practically no use in being familiar. It was a metaphor of my struggling journey to “familiarity.”