Artist Statement for Horizon (2003) by Yee I-Lann
 

(South Australia, 2003)
I love the open desert. I love having so much space. I love stretching my eyes to a distant distant point that's not interrupted by a tree, a building or a hill. I love that huge sky that gets heavier and heavier the longer I look at it and it lightly embraces me with all the knowledge and possibility of the universe. I love the disc of the earth, the horizon that circles me, marks me and places me Here. At this point. Here. I love having perspective. I am the center of the universe and this is my proof, everything stems from me. I can see it, it is real; it is true.

And then I take a step and everything changes, the horizon moves with me, stalking me yet running away with its continuous line; it's joining and separating, suffocating me. It teases me, questions me, challenges me and always my here, my perspective, changes and I am lost uncertain confused at the center of this disc that won't let me think, that won't let me be. The sky in concert with the horizon seals my escape, joining and separating. It denies its own existence as it denies mine. I have no mine. It is all illusion, it is not real but it is still true.

(Kuala Lumpur, October 2003)
During my recent stay in Australia I became obsessed with the horizon line. I found myself surrounded by this circular continuous line that separated the red disc of earth I stood on from a cloudless blue sky above. There were a few shrubby bushes, the straight road that divided the world in half, my sister's 'Ute' and me. That was it. Nothing. Yet everything. I would swing from feeling deliriously happy and free to feeling claustrophobic, lost and fearful of such space, of such unknown. And always my eye would stretch to that horizon line...

Back home in Kuala Lumpur and in Sabah I had become used to having my vision restricted by all manner of 'everything' - a building, a monument, a mountain. The obstacles, physical and metaphoric, affected my perspective and influenced my vision, which rarely stretched to see the horizon. I had also become used to being cocooned in the safety of these obstacles, trapped. I would not get carried away and dfall off the edge of the world. I would be saved by fencing.

So I took photographs of the Horizon, of the Unknown, to try and know it. The ground appeared closer in my photographs than in others I had seen then I realized this was because I am short and the horizon line teases. I realized the horizon only had significance when it had a referent.

I would use photographs to surrender the horizon to the 'hyperreal'; the image would become my accomplice. I would put a horizon back into our landscape and see what it would tell us. Culture and society are a flux of underdifferentiated images and signs. I would celebrate our kitsch and make 'referents' for The Line. I would stitch fragments together, heal wounds, join the imaginary with the symbolic. Other people would become complicit in the simulacrum as they knew what I knew and we would together tame the horizon and give it meaning. The model of the horizon would be reality and easily read. We would together tie it down, keep it still, fence it, define it, so We could have some perspective over it and The Great Unknown would become screened, indexed, put in it's place and Known to all. Time and space could be dislocated and it would have to be imprecise enough so as to be as communal as possible, democratized, used friendly. It would be death to the Unknown and we wouldn't 'fall off'. Ha!

But the Horizon would win. I would be another obstacle playing my role telling my true fictitious stories with the duplicity of repeated images and rehearsed staging. I would've looked for a metaphor that I could hold, see, where my perspective was solidly in the middle of the world but I would find nothing but another fence. The horizon perspective. I would've played straight into its game.
 

Webmaster's Note: Yee I-Lann, recipient of the Australian High Commission (Residency Award) held an exhibition of works produced during her residency in Australia. The exhibition was held at the Valentine Willie Fine Arts Gallery from 19th Nov to 29th Nov 2003.