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个人理解及笔记摘要
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My recent work grows out of my everyday experiences during my first month and a half living in the U.S. When I moved into an empty apartment, I started buying secondhand furniture and vintage items — mirrors, lamps, bar stools, and so on. The secondhand market here carries a kind of strange romance — a sense of time, stories, and texture. I first thought of it as a practical way to save money and settle into daily life. But the reality turned out to be far from this.
The whole process brought all kinds of strange experiences — miscommunication over prices and pickup addresses, items that looked nothing like the photos, wrong sizes, deliveries that had to be rescheduled again and again. In these moments of “extreme inconvenience,” I started to realize what really bothered me wasn’t the logistics themselves, but the disconnect between systems and people.
In an increasingly totalized way of living, we rarely talk to another person when we buy things. Automation has filled the social void left by the absence of human interaction. Modern life has trained us to love convenience—apps, auto-pay systems, algorithms, automated warehouses—all make transactions seamless. You pick up packages from delivery lockers, leave returns at your door, and never have to deal with anyone. Gradually, human relationships are replaced by human–machine relationships; friction and negotiation between people slowly disappear. When every process is reduced to a simple “confirm order,” even our relationship with objects becomes shallow and surface-level.The automation of machines and the atomization of individuals happen at the same time — and the former accelerates the latter. As a person gradually loses the ability to interact with others, they start to prefer interacting with commodities instead, because dealing with things is so much easier than dealing with people.
If someone hides in a cozy, atmosphere-filled cave surrounded by beautiful objects, he might think he’s escaped from five days a week of mechanical mass production — that by retreating into this little cabin, he’s slowly recovering his sense of humanity.
But, as Mannheim says, a person can’t really know themselves on their own. We always need some kind of medium — a mirror, or what Habermas would call a moment of communication — to recognize who we are. We either talk to the dead through books, or to the living in real life. But through commodities, all we ever see is an empty reflection.
In contrast, the secondhand market forced me back into negotiation, waiting, misunderstanding — all those messy, inconvenient interactions. And strangely, I started to feel a sense of resistance in that — a resistance to the perfect, frictionless life.
In the uncertainty of secondhand exchanges, things like miscommunication, last-minute changes, or people not showing up actually become little cracks in the system — moments where people suddenly reappear outside the smooth flow of transactions. Those imperfect interactions become chances to rebuild connection. So in my work, I try to make that kind of erased friction visible again.I want to make imitations of vintage furniture—like an unstable chair. Its structure can hold weight, but it constantly reminds you that it’s not entirely stable.
The materials themselves follow a similar logic. The so-called divide between “natural” and “artificial” is really an outdated narrative. Wood comes from industrially managed forests; resin is mixed with mineral powder extracted from mining. They’ve never existed separately or purely. Instead of pretending to combine two opposites, I’d rather acknowledge how they’ve always been entangled—deep inside the same supply chain.
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