Gifts, not Mere Coincidences
2024
Thread, used t-shirts, wire, waiting pins(marking pins), beads
As a sojourner, crossing the path with some people at a certain place and time looks like a mystery and not a mere coincidence to me. These encounters give me positive thoughts, a sense of home, and often confirmations. I appreciate these encounters and consider them as gifts, with a higher purpose and reason beyond human understanding.
I expressed the relationships with these influential people through my previous installation, “Gift.” The material of yarn represents a notion of "gift", as hand-knitted items often become a form of “gift” to show care to family and friends. I chose red color as it immediately reminds me of an old East Asian myth of red strings of fate, where we express destined relationships as “connected with a red string” idiomatically. The color red is also a symbolic color representing love, as seen in the widespread use of red hearts and red roses. I collected some disused clothes from my friends and family to represent something belonging to someone influential to me. I started braiding them with wire and red thread, visualizing the way people cross their paths for a reason. These braided strands started to form a shape like flowers. It made me realize that these people are forming my life into a shape like a bunch of flowers, another form of “gift”.
The inclusion of beads represents a notion of "treasuring the moment of the encounters" here. The marking pins are used to hold the beads in place. Typically, marking pins are used as a part of the sewing process. In the Japanese language, they’re called ‘waiting pins’—literally, they’re waiting for the final threads to come. This idea of "waiting" makes me think about the future. The fabric of used t-shirts is a material from the past, while the marking pin suggests the future. Layering these materials leads me to reflect on the concept of “time.”
My emphasis in this new installation, "Gift, not Mere Coincidences," is to express my strong connection to the things I am reminded of that are meaningful to me, and my feeling of surprise when they appear out of context. These encounters are often called “coincidences” or “meaningful coincidences.” To me, they are not mere coincidences. It sounds like they are rare incidents, but at the same time, I believe these encounters are everywhere, beyond time and space.