Siyao Lyu
Imagination: A Double Narrative, 2022
Video, 2’36’’
Before getting into the following text, please experience the work first. When you are experiencing, what do you see and hear? What do you want to ask?
You may notice there is a correspondence yet inconsistency between the content of the voice and the images. This video was created based on double narratives: a vocal narrative narrated by Maxine Greene, an American educational philosopher, author, social activist, and teacher, in 1998; and a visual narrative narrated by Siyao Lyu, the artist of this work, in 2022. Siyao firstly formed the idea of this work deeply inspired by Greene’s writing about aesthetic experience, especially how people can get aesthetic experiences from everyday life. Noticing the numbness of walking every day from the apartment she is living in to Teachers College, where she attends school, Siyao decided to took a slow walk along this seemingly-not-interesting route she has been taking for the past three months and videotaped anything caught her eyes in this process. Originally, Siyao was planning to write a script based on Greene’s Aesthetic Literacy in General Education. However, before her editing, she encountered on a speech by Greene on YouTube, in which, Greene made a similar expression about how she took the same bus to Teachers College every day to such an extent that she never saw anything. Surprised by this resemblance of experiences across 24 years, Siyao decided to edit her footage responding to Greene’s narrative.
SIYAO LYU 