Unfinished Perception II
A moving image series across Wuxing
Video, 12’35”, 2025
Filmed in The Hermitage, Scotland and Biesenthal, Germany
“Well done, badly done, not done — they’re all the same.”
“Wood means to touch, to sprout.” — Shuowen Jiezi (说文解字)
木，触也，冒也。
In the “Wood” phase, I seeks to encounter growth not as metaphor, but as relation. Filmed in The Hermitage forest in Scotland — home to centuries-old Douglas Firs — the camera does not observe but lingers, waits, and listens. Through moss, bark, and carved scars, time accumulates across species.
The film unfolds in layered durations:
Human time (waiting for a shot to complete),
Tree time (decades of healing in a burl),
Moss time (quiet growth across the frame).
In one scene, I steps into the hollow of an ancient tree — a small, improvised act of bodily merging. As insects crawl over the shared stillness, difference blurs. Wood becomes memory, vessel, and shelter — a material archive of slowness and repair.
This phase asks:
How does growth shape perception?
What emerges through proximity, not observation?
Like the tree’s rings or the camera’s loop, perception here spirals — not toward resolution, but toward entanglement. The work does not seek to be “well done” or “complete,” but to remain unfinished — and in that, alive.
The central static shot, though seemingly motionless, reveals a slow temporal flow through subtle changes in wind, light, and bodily presence. This aligns closely with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image: time is no longer structured by action but instead becomes perceptible in its own right. Here, time is revealed through space.
The side screens, composed of fragmented images of different parts of the tree (rings, bark, cavities), are arranged in a temporal sequence. The viewer constructs a sense of the tree’s spatial wholeness through the unfolding of time. In this way, space is constructed through time.
By placing my body inside the tree and structuring the work through multiple image layers, I came to realize that video is not merely a tool of representation—it actively participates in the construction of temporal experience. It is the tree’s stillness, the spatial arrangement of the triptych, and my own withdrawal as “human subject” that together initiate a mode of presentation governed by nonhuman rhythms. This marks a shift from operating the medium, to reflecting on the ontology of the medium itself, with embodied experience becoming a site of philosophical engagement. Within the framework of the Five Elements, Wood represents emergence and outward growth. The tree, as the symbolic and material embodiment of this phase, becomes more than a natural form—it acts as a mediator of nonhuman temporality. Through its unique rhythm and logic of becoming, it allows me to reconnect the body, the medium, and the temporal mechanics of film philosophy, and to open a mode of practice rooted in ecological feminist inquiry.
I selected natural organisms such as trees and mushrooms as interactive subjects and recorded the sound feedback generated during physical contact with them. Through this device, the voices of plants were made audible.
This experiment relates to the concept of “forest intelligence”, which understands the forest as a continuously perceiving, regulating, and communicating ecological body. When I touched bark, mycelium, and branches with my body, the resulting sound feedback became a trace of being permitted to enter the forest’s perceptual field.
To activate a more responsive perceptual relationship, I intentionally touched the plants while they were producing sound. In this phase, natural materials were no longer passive objects; through sound-generating devices, they spoke back, forming a triadic negotiation channel among human, plant, and technology. Plants were not merely observed but became active participants in the perceptual event through their sonic feedback.
I used the TouchMe device to connect with various types of mushrooms and tree trunks—such as Schizophyllum commune, Coprinus, and Pleurotus. When touched, each of them could “produce sound,” but the responses were remarkably different: Schizophyllum commune and Pleurotus generated steady, breath-like sounds, while Coprinus responded with irregular, jumpy tones—fast, interrupted, and volatile. This contrast made me realize that even with the same gesture, different organisms "speak" in their own ways.
This work emerges from the Wood phase of my practice as a process of re-composition and re-alignment. Its first point of departure was The Hermitage in Scotland, where towering Douglas firs stand like ancient pillars. I once stepped into the hollow of one tree and remained there for ten minutes, letting only wind, light, and the occasional passerby enter the frame. Later, in Berlin, surrounded daily by trees—at Uhlandstraße 14 and in the nearby forest of Biesenthal—I found myself living in close proximity with them. It was here that I wrote and suspended four questions on strips of linen, allowing them to be rewritten by wind, rain, and sunlight:
What unfulfilled promise do your rings carry?
What mycelial negotiations are occurring beneath my feet?
When I fall silent, what echoes shimmer through your leaves?
Am I only recording your mirage?
These questions did not seek answers. Rather, they turned language itself into a gesture of offering, handed over to nonhuman time and material presence.
In the cosmology of the Five Elements, wood is associated with growth, unfolding, and renewal. For me, it is less a theme than a method: slowing down, yielding, and dwelling alongside. The film does not advance through linear narrative but breathes through overlapping temporalities. My human time is defined by waiting and observing; the tree’s time is inscribed in rings and scars of healing; the moss’s time unfolds almost imperceptibly; digital time, meanwhile, is generated by data, frame rates, and storage—another kind of non-organic duration. In editing, I sought to layer these times within a single frame: the stillness of the central shot, the upward gaze toward the canopy, the close textures of bark, the fabric inscriptions smoothed by rain. I also experimented with 3D scanning to retain a digital trace of one tree’s presence. Inevitably incomplete, the scan reminded me that any act of capture is always partial, and that the tree’s existence exceeds what can be recorded.
This single-channel version is not a reduction of the earlier three-screen installation but an articulation of what I call an “unfinished method.” I keep the structure open, guided not by causality but by the rhythms of perception. The recurring image of myself standing within the hollow acts not as a narrative thread but as a temporal motif—where human embodiment intersects with nonhuman duration. As I returned to the four questions during editing, they did not “illustrate” specific images but instead pulled, fractured, and reassembled the footage in unexpected ways. In this way, language shifted from explanation to invocation, and the image itself became less a representation than a site of co-creation.
I am neither Scottish nor German. Moving between these places, I remain in a state of in-betweenness, uncertain of belonging. Yet within this dislocation I come closer to the trees, to entangled relationships not of mastery but of adjacency—where words can fade, where images can be rewritten by wind and rain, where the body can learn to wait. If something is “finished” here, it is only a dialogue in continual formation: wood as object and method, as material and time, as other and as guide. The work remains unfinished, as a gesture of honesty in practice: I am still listening; the image is still growing; the questions are still being answered slowly by the forest.
Exhibitions:
Oct 16, 2025, 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Berlin, Karl-Marx-Straße 95, 12043 Berlin, Deutschland
30th Oct 25 - 3rd Nov 25
The Koppel Project, London
Awards:
Beyond Border International Film Festival, Honorable Mention
"Is incompletion itself a valid state of making?"
Unfinished Perception is a generative exploration of how sensing, responding, and meaning-making can unfold beyond the boundaries of the human. Inspired by the Five Phases (五行) — water, wood, fire, earth, and metal — the series invites viewers to experience perception not as something to be finalized, but as a living, recursive field of exchange between human, non-human, and machinic actors.
Each phase centers on a different element not as metaphor, but as co-creative force. Drawing from Daoist cosmology — including the idea of “生生不息” (endless generation) and “修无相生” (formless interdependence) — the project unfolds through partial alignments, unfinished loops, and open-ended time. In this sense, "unfinished" becomes not a lack, but a principle of possibility — echoing Robert Filliou’s Fluxus notion that incompletion is itself a valid state of making.