You wake up from your sleep, look around, and don't recognize your surroundings. You glance in the mirror and don't recognize the face looking back at you. The shape of your lips, the color of your eyes, and the birthmark on your forehead all feel foreign. With no memory of anything, who would you be?
While I am currently re-igniting the spark that started my love for everything art, I have continuously questioned myself about my existence, who I was, who I currently am, and who I strive to be. As a lover of art, I have dabbled in many different stories from anime, comics, manga, cartoons, and TV shows etc., trying to understand the minds of artists and their characters alike. What kind of person were these artists and what values of themselves did they instill into their characters--or better yet, what values did they explore in their characters that they themselves would never dare to?
As an aspiring comic artist myself, working on my own stories, these thoughts never cease to run rampant through my mind. So I did this art piece, letting all that chaos curate itself into a project that emulates the essence of my thoughts. First, let's break down how we can even begin to answer this question: Who Are We?
Memory and Identity
The Meaning Behind Self-Concept
According to English Philosopher and Physician John Locke, our personal identity is based on our memory and consciousness and not on the continuity of either body or soul.
Our actions today can be perceived as an extension of previous actions, meaning that everything we do, how we do it and why we do it for the most part is due to a prewritten set of events that have repeatedly happened.
However, David Hume, a Scottish Philosopher, Historian and Economist takes a more radical turn. He suggests the self is not a fixed substance but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.
What if in some mysterious way, both were true? Even if we removed our memory completely, would we still like the things we like? And would memory just explain why we like the things we like? While I won't dive into the big science behind it all, it is quite an intriguing phenomenon, but how does this all ties into art itself?
Storytelling, Art and the Memory–Identity Connection
How we use stories and art to house memory and identity.
When we tell our life story, we are packaging memory into narrative shape. For the artist, the canvas is another such shape. My art is an externalization of memory fragments: I convert visceral memory into visual metaphor.
In film and fiction, memory-loss is a potent device used to whip a story to a particular narrative. The protagonist without memory must reconstruct identity.
I ask myself if I erased my past works, would I still be the same artist? If the story of those works is lost, does my identity shift? If I didn't follow the career others wanted for me and followed my heart from the start, would I be the artist I am today?
Beyond the individual, communities tell stories about their pasts: shared memories become cultural identity. In art I sometimes engage with collective memory, heritage, diaspora, inherited trauma. Without those shared memories, what is the cultural self? Without all the bad and good experiences, would I have been morphed into someone of such wisdom?
As an artist I both preserve memory and reinterpret it. I am a narrator translating inner archive into visible form. The identity of the artist becomes intertwined with memory, what I choose to remember, what I obscure, what I reconstruct.
That dual role, of witness and narrator, means that storytelling becomes a medium through which identity is both expressed and challenged.
Who Are We?
The Art Piece Explained
The "Who Are We?" art piece expresses a fragmented figure, as pieces of itself float nearby, held in place with strings connected to the brain. It symbolizes how our memories are a core part of who we may actually be. However, it could also mean our identity is perceived by others, but not necessarily ourselves. Our loss of memory might only make us unrecognizable to them, however, we could move on to doing things we innately like to do. This project does not instill my interpretation but an opening of a discussion.
If memory defines identity, then forgetting paints a new self, or erases the older one. If identity transcends memory, then even in forgetting, something persists, a posture, an essence, a medium.
In storytelling, in art, we grapple with this constantly. We ask of ourselves and other characters, "Who are you when you cannot recall your own past?" What stories do you tell, what memories do you salvage or invent? As an artist, I have created a piece that poses these questions visually; as a writer, I invite you to explore them in your own story, your own life.
Reflection & Resonance
Maybe we are the sum of our memories, but we may also be the silence between them, the blank canvas that holds the possibility of re-making. In the absence of memory, the self is not necessarily lost; it is altered, unsettled, open.
Also, maybe this is our chance to embrace our pasts, the joyous highs and the wearying lows, hone our traumas, forge our mistakes and misfortunates into weaves of our identity, not as an anchor to hold us down, betraying our own sense of self with negative derivatives but as a chisel to shape us anew.
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