Issue 12: Becoming

at the end of the earth, I find {}

Ivan Zhao
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At the end of the earth, I find {} is a triptych poem—a letter and reflection on my family, ancestral home, grandparents, and the ways to visualize silence. The poem is a piece that discusses my tenuous relationship with my extended family back in China, the inability to communicate in another language, my failure with language, my queerness and Chinese culture, and the fundamental truth that my family will never accept my queerness. This creation is an act of rebellion, but also a longing, that is mediated by the pulsating image (in time to a heartbeat), and plays with the notion of time as it pulsates between a young child and an older child.

This work consists of three sections: 

taste: a poem / image collage: it disappears slowly, to mimic the erosion of language 

quiet: a visualization of silence in typography. The brackets pulse and move, indicating the length of silence, the duration of silence, expanding the silence wider and wider and wider…

love: a grid of words, slowly converging towards a single love, a single desire. when it’s found, a new desire is chosen.