私?日本語?話???? Wa-ta-shi wa...

聽寫王系列 TengSeWong/VoiceWriter Series	私は日本語が話せません Wa-ta-shi wa...
	愛してるか……Ai-si-te-ru ka... (Part 1) @ Daizahoshi Pond, Iizuna Height, Nagano (in collaboration with Koji Oike)


I invited Koji Oike, a Japanese artist in the NIPAF, to join my pond-side performance. Each of us stood at one end of a wooden bridge. Speaking something to each other like lovers, we shouted in turn in our own languages: ‘how are you?/你好嗎？’, ‘Do you love me?/愛してるか。’ etc. Each time we repeated each other’s language and stepped forward until we met. What we said might not be important literally, but how much we can understand each other indeed. The performance ended when we could not step further to each other and there were indeed lots of gaps in between the whole bridge.
愛してるか……Ai-si-te-ru ka... (Part 2) @ Sekishoji-Temple, Kumagya
The performance took place in a temple garden and therefore I decided to do a ritual performance. I started the performance with audio recordings of the last performance and exclaimed the answer to the love question: ‘Ai-si-te-ru yo/愛してるよ！’ (I love you.!) My voice was input into computer which transcribed it automatically into Chinese. Tearing a paper face mask off from the tree, I handed it to an audience and spoke to him/her in Cantonese what the computer typed and projected on the wooden wall. The transcription repeated when my voice was inputted in the computer and generated another text, and so on. When all the face masks on the tress were gone, I ran away from the garden and a Japanese actor read out all the computer-generated Chinese text in Japanese, which did not make sense at all. Again, this work is about the ambiguity of language in love – the lover’s monologue seemed to be so indulgent and abstruse that it does not embrace the ‘love’ supposed to have in it at all.