My direction will probably be Farewell (I change my mind a lot, hopefully not this time). From my own experience, it’s hard to get through that time after parting, or it’s painful for a long, long time, or people feel regrets all the time. One of the reasons is that we didn’t say goodbye properly and formally. I hope my work can help people to let go of a relationship or thing they have left but regretted. And hopefully, it will also help people prepare for future farewells, including myself. In my Thesis, the medium I want to experiment with is gaming or AR.

 

I don’t know if it’s a technical problem with my search, I didn’t find many interactive artworks related to farewell. The most searched works of art are literary works. But these mere texts are also very emotionally resonant. Here I quote a few.

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
—- A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)
“Don’t be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.”
—- Richard Bach
I also found some movies.

Spirited away poster.jpg

Life is a train bound for the grave. There will be many stops along the way, and it is difficult for anyone to accompany you from beginning to end. When the person accompanying you wants to get off the bus, be grateful even if you don’t want to, and then wave goodbye.

—- Spirited Away

 

Farewell is both the end and the beginning, pain and hope; and the best attitude towards farewell is to say goodbye well.

—- Love Letter

 

And the Pixar animation Coco that I wrote about in my first week of Journal.

超推可可夜總會#無雷心得 - 電影板 | Dcard

The real death is that no one in the world remembers you.

—- Coco

 

I’ve also discovered a few different ways of saying farewell/goodbye that have to do with culture.

I saw a goodbye gift on a shopping site, a post-moving survival kit, which listed a few things people might use after moving to a new location. This seems very novel to me. It seems that in my country, it is rare to prepare a farewell gift. On the contrary, if you meet someone for the first time, everyone often prepares a “meeting gift”. And some of the items in this kit are conceptually meaningful. For example, there are candles in this kit. After the electrical age, people have used candles less and less, let alone “guide you on your journey”. But I think if I receive such a gift, although it will not be very practical, I will still feel very moved.

 

I also searched quora and 知乎 (Chinese) and found a lot of people asking how to write a good farewell email when resigning. This may be a work habit, but it also represents a recognition of past experience and good expectations for this relationship, and I hope to maintain this connection in the future.

 

I hope that in my works, a farewell is not only a sad thing but also positive energy, giving people the courage to move forward. In China, there are many poems about parting, there is an old saying — the green hills do not change, the green waters flow, and we will meet again in the future.