Elsewhere

 

The word ‘elsewhere’ suggests another place, another existence in an unusual sense:

 

We are ‘here’, while the performance site is ‘elsewhere’;

The place described in a script is always ‘elsewhere’;

 

Designers’ horizons benefit from the span of time and space. The history and reality far away in ‘elsewhere’ enable us to examine ourselves in a deeper and broader context. Artists obsess over a perfect order, a transcendent ideal, in which ‘elsewhere’ discloses their bigotry, curiosity, and madness.

 

‘Elsewhere’ not only emphasises the relevance of ‘here’ to ‘there’; it also reveals a sense of eternal division of time and space.

 

When a work drowns in an ocean of wordy rhetoric and vacuous concepts, losing the texture of existence and the immediacy of experience, we warn ourselves: this place is ‘elsewhere’, a fantasy, a fiction. It becomes a concept opposite to ‘the thing-in-itself’ being forcefully endowed meaning, and reminds us of the difference between our imagined selves and our actual selves.

 

‘Elsewhere’ also means the limitation of boundary and the infinity of the world. Throughout history, humans have always sought new approaches and perspectives from elsewhere to use to shatter visible limitations and achieve internal transformations. In 1991, Chinese stage designers spent nine days travelling across Eurasia via international railways to participate in the Prague Quadrennial. Twenty-eight years later, China’s exhibition team undertook the same train journey and recorded it on video to display at the exhibition. The video screens in the exhibition enclose a passageway, which can be best explained by a quotation from Thich Nhat Hahn: ‘We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness’.

 

If the original journey halfway around the world was ‘elsewhere’ in space, then the physical exhibits of historical documents about stage design in China and thirty artists’ mobile phones as contemporary documents are correspondingly ‘elsewhere’ in time.  

 

China’s exhibitions at different locations are also designed as a whole based on the pattern of concentric circles to extend the space to a limitless ‘elsewhere’, similar to the metaphor of the Golden Triga, helping to imagine the existence of a way of completeness.