A fire put me on a mental stove. Early this year, a fire broke out in my mountain lodge and cremated almost all my belongings. Books, records, instruments, photos, documents, and papers….
All physical memorials were gone to ashes. Suddenly, the fragility of life as memories, returns to haunt the soul unprepared. I now am truly empathetic about those who lost everything massacres, earth-quakes, floods and human or natural disasters.

When I met Narita at IRA about six months ago I asked about the possibility of an exhibition with the images of these past 40 years of personal creations with graphic designs. He gracefully agreed to give me some dates for exhibition at the shop. And I went down memory lane for the first time after all these years, and totally floored to discover the me in this domain of DIY living practice.

All these paper printed matters, except a few that are actual physical products at the time of production, most of them are re-output print-outs saved from hard disks rescued from the fire ground. Meanwhile, many were lost. They became the survivors of a memory for those who happened to be encountered, reckoned.

I must make a preamble. I am not an artist. I created and produced all these images because I cannot and would not pay for professional service. The do-it-yourself penchant has nothing to do with life-style sensibilities. They are harsh reality and militant insistence. See myself in the same light, I wrote poetry but I never claim to be a poet; I played music but never consider myself a musician, I used the language and signs of art, but I see myself not an artist. I am a commoner using the practice of art as manifestation. Therefor I coined the term “Artivist” back in the mid-90s and registered the domain as an internet presence, later occupied by others because I can no longer pay to keep it mine. The activist who took up using art, not the artist becoming an activist, though it isn’t a bad thing too.

The way I imagine my display is also a point I’d love to make here. Luckily kept in a case ungulfed by the fire, there was kept safely an appropriated old-school banner with a slogan: 『盡最大程度退出資本社會 』– try ya best to drop out of the capitalist order. It was one of the art-pieces featured in the Blackbooks Documenta Assemblage 2022 in Taipei City. This is central to my 40 years of practice. If I can use public resources, borrow items, relive outcasted materials, I’ll employ.

I usually use throw-away card boxes cut into necessary backbone paper for these image outputs. Especially during demonstrations, to make it hard-boarded to hold. But during performances and in-house displays, I tend to just stick them on the walls. We just did that in the borrowed gallery in our BBDA exhibition in Taipei two years ago. These images are naked. Unframed. Even spot-lights are unused. No strings attached. Just like writings on the walls. So bear with this. This is my subversion to normalcy in terms of exhibition display mannerism. Ground zero aesthetics. If that term is not too bourgeois.

I have too many stories to tell, upon these graphics scribbles, come and share with me. See you in Tokyo.

Lenny