Shirly Han

Shirly’s practice over the past few years has been marked by relentless exploration, a process through which she continually expands her possibilities of expression.  Considering the past and the future, her work is rooted in artistic research that takes oral stories,  urban myths, rumours and peculiar daily rituals as starting points. Focusing on the possibilities of  narratives embedded in everyday experience and matter. She examines how we form emotional  bonds with soundscapes, spatial dynamics, social interactions, and subcultural expressions, and  what becomes of them over time. Through sculpture, video, sound, and site-specific  interventions, disorientation has emerged as a method in her practice. Disorientation can create  absurdities, and a unique blurry tension between humour and repulsion, allowing playfulness to  be serious and seriousness to be playful. In this blurriness, the possibilities of the night can  appear in the middle of the day. The relentless task is to become blurry; to form constellations  from the separate and disparate, and to make sense of their newly found togetherness.

Process

I always start my work with mapping. As philosopher Vilém Flusser notes, imagination means “drawing maps and reading them.” This mapping is a fluid process that  navigates between memories, soundscapes, imaginations, and cultural narratives, in order to  form an orientation to the world. Seeking ways to materialise, and render visible, the power  structures unseen and abstracted from view; exploring the ways that such systems inscribe into  our lives.

Influences

Some works are influenced by listening experiences and subcultural expressions from club life (especially EASA scenes). Drawing inspiration from visual expressions  of sound structure, soundscapes and their environments, forming a more open perception. In  raving scenes you need to be seen but you also need to be willing to lose yourself. Through these practices there are a lot of hidden stories of myself and the people around me, their memories,  their ways of living, and the things they leave unfinished. Presenting fragments of this lived-in  history through storytelling and world-building.

Challenges

years ago I read about Pauline Oliveros’s 'deep listening' —an openness to experiences and an awareness of a wider world beyond limited lenses, forming these shifts between different perspectives, landscapes and the spaces we are living in, as an act of Resistance.

Reflection

Recently I’ve been thinking about the impact of bodily presence, and how  thoughts, movements, and energy shift throughout the process of making works. We are a river of  breath and blood; the body becomes thought, thought becomes movement. Now I’m working on  a series of new works that bring together different ways of seeing, merging histories and  contemporary realities, examining and questioning where our knowledge comes from.